Telco of the Future is a Software Company

"The telco of the next five years has to be a software company," says John Lazar, MetaSwitch CEO. That statement is rich with implications for business strategy, organization, investment and priorities, but must at least incorporate the ability to "create and tear down" whole applications, service or features very rapidly, without labor-intensive physical processes. That's why MetaSwitch believes in IP Multimedia Subsystem.

The meaning does not extend as far as the notion that access networks and a range of services related to voice, data and video services will be unnecessary. What Lazar means is that since nobody really can predict what the killer app of the future is, providers simply must have the ability to react quickly when users suggest demand exists for any application that benefits from network access.  

And the access and services platform has to transcend silos. "You have to innovate quickly and build links between things," says Lazar. "Things you don't expect will stick," he notes, reminding people that  "nobody predicted SMS (text messaing) would be the huge success it hsa turned out to be."

But addressing both the current recessionary climate, which has nearly everybody reacting caustiously, Lazar also warned that some "people are not thinking ambitiously enough." There are opportunities to be seized, but action is necessary. And Lazar predicts innovators will do well in this recession.

There are constraints, to be sure. "Damn the dollars, full speed ahead" may not be a strategy many firms can embrace. But keep in mind: when somebody, or a company, says "something can't be done," you have to translate.

What the speaker means is that "I, or my organization, for a host of very-real reasons, cannot do it." That is different than saying something really cannot be done.

Other speakers may well say "something is possible, and can be done," because they do not have barriers of one sort or another that prevent them from doing something others say "cannot be done."

Over the next five years, people will do things that "cannot be done." They will be done for one simple reason. Despite a host of reasons why one contestant says something "cannot be done," others will operate without those constraints.