We now have 7 billion people in the world. What a great growth market. Unless, for some reason, you are a network operator facing the dreaded “scissor effect” of exploding traffic in the face of flat revenues. So why do people expect that the agricultural community will be able to keep up with demand, while telcos cannot? To feed our growing population, food production will need to double, and double again. It is a necessity for our survival. But we just expect food to appear on our table, even in the face of climate change and rising energy costs. Part of the reason may be in the fact that the agricultural community is just that, a community. Farmers see themselves as part of an extended supply chain, and they are driven by the value of putting nutrition on our tables. If we accept that communication is becoming a necessity to our connected society, then why can’t telcos expect the same?
Communications service providers in pursuit of non-traditional growth and revenue streams have come to accept that innovation does not grow on trees. Their transformation now includes the principle that they must enable partners in the supply chain to better utilize their networks and capabilities in an open and effective manner. Driving innovation and differentiation is becoming a more genetically engineered process–a hybrid of a richer and dynamic developer experience, with an inviting end-to-end customer experience, rooted in higher levels of operational awareness.
Operational awareness allows CSPs to balance the service velocity that developers desire, with the service quality that consumers expect. The “necessity” is becoming clearer. CSP can expose assets through a service delivery framework, acting as gateway to a structured, disciplined operational environment that encourages reuse and manages performance. This will allow the service provider to help bring connectivity and applications together in context the consumer can appreciate–more personalized, more localized, more real-time. More about putting the food on the table. Would this not make a stronger value proposition to an application developer than have to go over the top of, or disintermediating the network operator?
Telcordia will be participating in the Multi-Cloud Developer Experience Catalyst project at TM Forum Management World Americas in Orlando, Florida on 8-10 November 2011 [Catalyst]. The collaboration demonstrates how CSPs can harvest additional revenue opportunities by offering application developers an ecosystem that embraces the necessity of service velocity, without compromising service quality. It’s a critical step toward openness nurturing invention.
And finally, some food for thought. Our farmers recognize that population growth will strain the supply chain, particularly as produce needs to travel across regions with insufficient infrastructure and lack of regulatory oversight. Estimates are that nearly half of all the food produced will be lost on the trip from farm to household. Half. Farmers won’t solve that problem focusing their efforts on the farm—on incremental crop yields or more fuel-efficient equipment. While those are important, increasing their value to the market also depends on their ability to influence the supply chain, end to end, from seed to plate. It’s just a matter of embracing the necessity of it all.
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