ITEXPO Kicked off today in Ft. Lauderdale, FL with a keynote from Keith Chappell, Vice President at Alcatel-Lucent. His talk began discussing the concept of transforming services. “What do users want?” He asked.

 

To that he answered as follows.

 

Service Agility: The technical agility behind service environment allowing carrier business agility

 

Service Personalization: Think of ringtones or ringback tones

 

Service Blending: Services are not connected in a very robust way today according to Chappell. They become much more robust when you can connect them quickly and transparently. An example is on the internet with click to dial which connects a web session with a telephony session. You can get more complex he says with personalization.

 

Quality of Experience: Is the service performing adequately? Is voice and video quality acceptable? The quality is not there yet according to Keith. He says the question worth asking is how easy is it to use these services? Chappell says if the services are not easy they will not be used.

 

In general Keith mentioned the service provider infrastructure must mirror what has happened with the web with layers and abstractions. He likens the future of the service provider being a factory that churns out applications. Users will rapidly determine what they like and what they don’t. Service providers will have to react instantaneously to what users want and what they don’t. Expect more applications from service providers – like shows that go off the air he says. Using this analogy perhaps network hits will be the equivalent of killer applications in the services/software model.

 

I think Chappell did an admirable job as the first keynoter of the day. He describes a world where service providers will be able to act quickly and respond immediately to customer demands. He envisions a future where these providers are able to generate revenue in ways they don’t today.

 

In a way this is exactly the sort of speech you want to hear at a show called Internet Telephony (ITEXPO) as when this show was started back in 1999, consumers and businesses expected to pay large sums of money for long distance. Over time the price for these calls has decreased and as it has service providers need to look anywhere and everywhere to generate additional revenue. Perhaps the concept of the services factory will be what replaces long distance in the future.