Jim Warner, Vice Chairman of the TeleManagement Forum

Telephony recently talked to TMF's Jim Warner about developments in the world of telecom operations and how those trends factor into TMF's direction and the agenda of the upcoming TeleManagement World Americas 2006. Click here to hear an audio interview with Jim Warner and more about the content of the TMF's December event.

You would have to be hidden away in the woods to not pick up on all of the different forces that are colliding and converging or slamming into the telecom industry. That has set up an extremely dynamic business environment and marketplace, and it will be won by people who follow a slightly different set of rules than the telecom companies are used to following.

We believe that underpinning all that is a very progressive view of how you manage not just your network, but also how you create and deliver innovative new services, and do it in rapid time--the kind of time scales you would normally see coming out of a consumer goods company. How do you offer the kind of service to people that they're used to getting from, say, L.L. Bean, or a rent-a-car company or something like that?

These are all the things we want to explore. We believe that is the heart and soul of what we would call progressive management or lean operations, and that the companies that embrace that kind of change will be the ones that stand to make more money and have a greater market share.

The problem is, of course, that you can talk about it all day long, but you very quickly run into some very basic and very nasty systems kind of issues. They have so many different systems and databases, it's impossible in many respects to offer, say, customer self-service, which is probably what most people want to do. Service providers are starting to appreciate it and realize it, but I'm not sure they've come nose-to-nose with it, and if they are they're scared out of their wits at what it's going to really take because of the legacy problem they've got.

Clearly, software vendor consolidation is going to have an impact. All of this is totally predicted. When you have consolidation taking place on the operator side, it's just natural. You don't need several hundred $80-million companies. It just doesn't make sense.

It's going to cause a legacy problem for the vendors too. OK, Oracle buys MetaSolv--that doesn't mean that overnight, all Oracle stuff works with all the other stuff that Oracle's bought. They're going to have legacy integration issues of their own, and this is where we're seeing a need for something like Prosspero to come in--which is a sort of guaranteed-it-will-work standard, because if for nothing else, it starts to save the vendors money when they start to weave together all these piece-parts that they've bought. --As told to Jason Meyers

Click here to hear an audio interview with Jim Warner and more about the content of the TMF's December event.