Innovation the theme so far at TMW

DALLAS: Calling on its membership to accelerate the pace of innovate, the TeleManagement Forum enlisted one of the Internet’s earliest innovators and still current innovator, Lawrence Roberts, CEO of Anagran to issue the call along with keynote speakers from Lucent, Satyam and Verizon.

Roberts, known for his role as lead engineer in the development of ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network--the first packet network interconnecting the nation’s research computers and foundation for what is now the Internet—also started Telenet, which became part of Sprint’s data network, and Caspian Networks. He is now CEO and founder of Anagran.

Despite his role in the creation of the Internet, Roberts hasn’t been too impressed with the rate of innovation over the last 30 years, calling it non-existent in some cases. His fast-paced, highly technical, stream of consciousness run through the history of packet switching, the routing technology then and now for the Internet, culminated in his call for innovation to replace that technology once and for all.

His solution, one advanced by his new company, Anagran, is called flow state aware routing. The economics that have kept the technology out of router development for the last 30 years has changed, he said.

Among other benefits, the technology can increase utilization by 83% and address the issue of denial-of-service attacks against which today’s routers have failed.

“It is obvious to me that FSA will replace packet routing within 10 years,” Roberts said.

Later, in a panel discussion Roberts said that service providers have tended to get even more conservative through the bust in recent years when it comes to innovation.

Keith Willetts, chairman of the TeleManagement Forum, said the lack of innovation historically has had nothing to do with money and that telecom has been both the most innovative and least innovative industry at the same time. “This is a wealthy industry. We invent great stuff that allows others to use the network for innovation. We build products to last for 50 years, so we aren’t good at innovating [new products],” he said.

While Roberts called for innovation in fundamental networking, other called on their operation and business support system brethren to innovate in the back office. Citing the inevitable move toward an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture, Janet Davidson, chief strategy officer at Lucent Technologies, said that the vision would get stuck in place without OSS.

“IMS cannot happen unless we bring along the systems that support it,” Davidson said.

With the percent of household income that goes to telecom plummeting, content and entertainment will be the drivers of revenue and these services put more of the onus on service providers to be aware of how the customer is using and perceiving these services, she said.

“If we don’t get this right, these services will be deployed in someone else’s network,” Davidson said. Among the things she said OSS vendors, and thereby their service provider customers, need to get right is keeping the network healthy and allowing it to micromanage itself, taking on the entire burden of security, eliminating billing errors and be aware of the various quality-of-service requirements of all the different services.

“Next generation systems need to be aware of what customers are doing,” Davidson said. “We have to look at a lot of things we haven’t had to before. [For example] if a customer takes a whole IPTV bundle and then has a problem, think of all the things that could cause that.”

She urges vendors to extend their reach into the home and business in order to see what’s going on inside the customers’ domains

“Consumers are an important part of the equation. They will make our lives harder and we’ll also have to depend in them to make it easier,” Davidson said.

Shadman Zafar, senior vice president of architecture an eServices at Verizon, agreed that the success of IMS I slinked to OSS.

“IMS will follow a path of wide acceptance if it’s a quick and easy migration. Its success depends on the execution to operationalize,” Zafar said. “In the new generation of service, OSS is the service.”

Zafar asked several questions about whether or not quality or convergence matters and whether its the network or the application [that’s important.]

He answered: “In the long run, you can’t get around convergence, but it cannot be the driver. It has to be the opposite. New innovative services have to drive convergence. Convergence should be subservient to what goes on in the market,” Zafar said.

On the matter of the network versus the application, he said that the application should leverage the unique capabilities of the network.

Satyam Computer Services Chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, urged people to think about how innovation can be used “as a new way of engaging the rest of the world.”

His company, India’s fastest to a $1 billion run rate, is promoting the idea of virtualized consulting and IT services, which include design, integration, development, maintenance and support. Raju said that the idea is much more than offshore outsourcing in which the debate pits one country against another.

Raju said that 80% of the service his company is involved in today are things the company had no presence in a few years ago. And most of them can be delivered virtually, from India and other parts of the world.

“If the four billion people on the periphery who are not part of the global market can become part of it…it would promote the success of countries around the world,” Raju said.