The IT-telecom transformation

Last week’s IBM-Cloudshield announcement is just one more indication of the rapid pace at which IT technology is moving into the telecom world, displacing the proprietary and purpose-built systems of the industry’s past.

The reasons for this transformation are many but it all boils down to two things: price and speed of change. Telecom service providers need to be able to more rapidly build and deploy (and for that matter, take down) new services, and they need to be able to do this economically and at scale.
For as long as I’ve been covering telecom – more than two decades – service providers have complained that their equipment vendors have been too slow in bringing new software to market.

Over the course of those two decades, IT technology has grown up, become more reliable and therefore more ready to fit into the Central Office environment. The public network prejudice against technology developed for the enterprise has been completely shredded by the rapid deployment of Ethernet, albeit at carrier grade.

Using off-the-shelf, best-of-breed open systems makes even more sense when you consider the way telecom operators also are embracing Web Services capabilities, instead of insisting on re-inventing the wheel telecom style.

Of course, there are challenges ahead on this front, not the least of which is manpower and training. The new telecom techs of the future must be well-versed in IT which means additional training and the potential need for universities and other training grounds to adopt new programs. But the transformation of the CO is well under way and there’s no turning back.