Management World: Ex-AT&T CTO offers 'top 10' vision

Eslambolchi

ORLANDO -- Noting that he’s not David Letterman, then proving it with a joke (roughly: in the 1960s, people took LSD to shake up a staid world; today they take Prozac to make sense of a mixed-up world), former AT&T chief technology officer Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi offered up his vision for the future of the telecom industry in the form of a top 10 list in his morning keynote at the Management World forum today.

Eslambolchi, one of the industry’s most well-respected technologists, is increasingly focusing on the OSS/BSS world. He is currently chairman and CEO of video search engine company Divvio and also recently signed on to the advisory board of OSS vendor Intelliden. He put forth a vision – which he says he first predicted 15 years ago – in which “IP eats everything,” noting that service providers must respond to that fact by creating more dynamic network application architectures capable of managing and assuring services in a much more sophisticated fashion.

Here are the top 10 trends Eslambolchi said service providers must take into account as they move into this new network environment:

10 – Next-generation speech recognition and natural language understanding will redefine the human machine interface. Those capabilities will be supported by the emergence of a much more structured, “semantic” Web that will enable the move beyond simple textual search. What Google or Yahoo offer today in terms of search “is going to be primitive in five to ten years,” he said.

9 – Knowledge mining will transform how we do business. Eslambolchi described this evolution as the move from data mining to information mining to being able to glean real, actionable knowledge from the network.

8 – Open-source components at the network edge will dominate. Innovation will continue to happen at the network’s edge, he said, and if open-source products can bring with them scalability, reliability and network effects, the economic benefits of open source will play in the telecom world as they did in the IT world.

7 – Broadband will be global and will flatten the economy. This is already happening, he said, with proof points around the globe.

6 – E-collaboration and social networking will continue to grow into enterprise and consumer mobile applications. Myspace and Facebook are only the beginning.