MWA: TMF president gets presidential

DALLAS--Leery of being a prognosticator in an industry where much of what has been prognosticated in the last ten years has become rubbish, TM Forum president Martin Creaner nonetheless delivered a blunt but hopeful state of the OSS union address at the forum’s Management World Americas event this week.

Creaner warned his membership that, partly because of its slow movement on delivering a service delivery framework on par with over-the-top providers, it is now increasingly possible to sideline the traditional telco from the value chain.

“Unless service providers can secure a portion of revenue [in that chain], they will find themselves fighting tighter and tighter margins…and will be increasingly relegated to a bit provider,” Creaner said. “And when these guys go over the top, traditional telcos are cut out of that sweet incremental service revenue.”

This scenario is still the exception to the rule, Creaner said, “But the frightening thought is that this could soon become the rule for the industry. ”

However, playing the good president, Creaner highlighted the progress being made within the forum and with its members on this front. He said the industry now has IPTV deployments, IMS-based service delivery platforms that actually work and OSS and BSS interfaces that have actually become standards.

Creaner also said the forum is “closing the loop” with the cable industry. In addition to Time Warner Cable Chief Technology Officer Mike Lajoie securing a keynote spot at the forum and becoming a new member, several cable companies have joined the forum over the last year, particularly after the group acquired IPDR.org, whose mediation technology is a standard within the cable standard DOCSIS.

More frightening than all the incorrect predictions made by past presidents and industry experts are the developments they have failed to anticipate at all, Creaner said. “No one back then predicted…telecoms as being in the same business as cable companies.”

He also said the word convergence can make some people choke, but that it was as good a word as any to define the new world in which the telecom industry finds itself. And the best thing about that world for service providers, he said, is that new client services need to be seamless in order to attract consumers and “unless someone can manage that end-to-end, they simply will not work.”

That has always been telecom’s sweet spot and will remain so, but Creaner said another way service providers can increase the value-add is through a proper service delivery framework that exposes easy-to-use services like authentication and location to content providers. “No telco has a right anymore to be dominant in the value chain; they will have to earn it,” Creaner said.

Nobody knows for sure what will happen, he said, and in 10 more years, some TM Forum president will laugh at these assumptions. “But that’s what makes it interesting,” he said. “It’s high-stakes gambling for grownups.”