In a briefing on the discussion at one of the keynote sessions at the recent TMF Live event in Nice, Andrew Feinberg, CEO of Netcracker and Phil Jordan, CIO of Telefonica explain the industry’s dilemma. In short, operators, indeed, the ecosystem, is suffering from a digital identity crisis. If you say ‘digital’ to one service provider, it will mean one thing, say it to another, and it will mean another. Whether an operator wants to focus on the wholesale market, or whether it wants to emulate companies such as Google, it is partnerships with companies like Netcracker that will solve the identity crisis, according to Jordan.
Telefonica has come a long way, given the challenges of having many different businesses in many different regions and environments. But Jordan thinks that there are a couple of fundamentals that are true wherever you are. He talks about these in this video, and he also believes the trick is to collaborate and promote openness. And he has put his money where his mouth is by signing up to the TM Forum’s Open API Manifesto.
Phil Jordan, Group CIO, Telefonica and Andrew Feinberg, President and CEO, Netcracker from TM Forum on Vimeo.
I wonder if the concept of ‘openness’ is as potentially misleading as ‘digital’? What are we talking about here? If it’s just a case of operators, SIs and system vendors getting together to figure out how they can work together differently, will this make anything ‘open’ in any meaningful sense? What WOULD make sense is if Telefonica and Netcracker came up with a way of unbundling their products and services and using virtualisation to assemble them into different configurations, accessible as web services to potential customers in the outside world. That would be open, and potentially game-changing. It would also be what Amazon and Paypal are doing so effectively. It might even be digital.