TMW: Facing the future

DALLAS--TeleManagement Forum founder and chairman Keith Willetts, in his traditional keynote address at TeleManagement World Americas here, acknowledged a future ripe with possibilities for how telecom services may evolve. Though he nearly built to a grand prediction of that future and how the TMF will play in it, he ultimate settled on some cautionary advice.

“Don’t just take what you see now and forward it into the future, and believe that the future will look like that,” Willetts said.

Adding his voice to a theme that seemed to be building through the morning’s other keynote speeches, Willetts acknowledged that the Skypes, MySpaces and YouTubes of the world are helping show the telecom industry where new applications will come from and how people will use services, but cautioned that no one knows yet how sustainable or truly influential these firms will be. “There is a huge a explosion of services coming from [the Internet and social networking sites], but there are some economic things wrong with that model. They are taking a free ride on the network for now, and distorting the market, but no matter how much you distort the market, economics will catch up with you.”

He added, “Skype has more customers than AT&T or Verizon but a fraction of their income, and no one knows yet how sustainable that is or what will happen,” whether or not traditional carriers will evolve toward Skype’s model, or Skype will evolve more in the other direction.

If there’s a transition to be made by traditional carriers, it’s toward better service enablement, creating standardized structures for new applications and network transactions. “The future is in value chains and being able to understand them,” he said.

He also came close to specifying how the TMF’s role and membership will evolve in kind, but said only, “The TMF has to get into the middle of service enablement. The challenge for the TMF will be able to move its mindset” to respond to trends like more distributed management of services.