GEORGE NOLEN, SIEMENS

As industry pundits continue to analyze the myriad reasons for telecom's endless nuclear winter, more than a few have placed at least some of the blame on equipment providers' collective inability to listen to what carriers really want.

George Nolen wants you to know that he's been listening, and that he hears you loud and clear.

As president and CEO of Siemens' Information and Communication Networks, Nolen has a customer-centric picture of tomorrow's vendor organization that bears little resemblance to the once-ballyhooed one-stop shop.

“In the previous scenario, suppliers looked more like a Wal-Mart, where they supplied everything,” he said. “You couldn't possibly invest in every area at the levels you need to invest in to have leading-edge technologies.”

To avoid the Wal-Mart syndrome, Siemens continues to take a pragmatic approach to the fickle market, and its ongoing reorganization — during which it has reduced its cost structure by roughly 50% and payroll from 7200 to 3800 employees — is finally drawing to a close. “I would never go as far to say it's completely over,” said Nolen. “But I'm very confident that most all of the major restructuring is behind me.”

In the afterlife of a major market shake-up, Siemens may emerge in better standing than most large equipment vendors, in part because of its conservative financial policies. While many of its peers were throwing money at their carrier customers in an effort to win contracts and ship product, Siemens grew its businesses organically, Nolen said.

Now Siemens can focus squarely on what lies ahead, and from Nolen's perspective it looks something like this: a portfolio that includes voice over IP, next-generation communication platforms, softswitching and Centrex IP services. Siemens developed all that with its eye on the horizon and its ear on the ground — if the customer doesn't want it, Siemens isn't interested in offering it.

And what the customer wants right now is IP-driven applications such as SIP-based phones — especially the enterprise market, which currently has higher growth potential than the consumer space, Nolen said.

“We see that as a great opportunity to get in and start to build applications on their networks for these types of advanced services, and over time that will be the evolution of their IP network,” he said.

So what happens when the Wal-Marts of the telecom world go the way of KMart? Expect to start seeing more partnerships between large players, Nolen predicted. Gone are the days of giant vendors absorbing smaller niche players in amoeba-like fashion. If a company isn't first — or at least second — in a given market, forget it.

“It is not a scenario where the leading company will be number one in optical, number one in access, number one in enterprise, number one in CPE — the ability to do that is clearly not a goal that anybody is striving to do,” Nolen said. “There's no room in the marketplace to be fifth or sixth.”