Continuity in the industry

COHEN: IBM has always been involved with the telecommunications industry, but our commitment continues to grow. We are investing heavily and we continue to invest in their service delivery platforms for the future services.

We're investing in mechanisms and methodologies to be able to drive down the cost of operations. We're building out Services-Oriented Architecture approaches to be able to allow them to operate more quickly and with greater responsiveness.

And we are a partner that looks to our clients to input to us how we ought to invest, how we ought to be building products, what companies and technology we ought to acquire to build out our resume and our portfolio of capabilities in the future.

ARNOLD: Actually, the telecom solution labs are a living example of our commitment as well as of our investment. We created them in November, 2000, where we announced that we will have labs around the globe where we would build solutions for telecommunications industry.

In all of these labs we bring our hardware, our software, our research, our services and our partner assets together to create powerful solutions that help our customers to win in the market space.

AITKEN: We've become, I think, in the last two years, a very good partner for Network Equipment vendors as well as other ISVs. Primarily because we've moved very much to telco standards and our IMS platform which we just GA'd is an open telco standard platform, allowing easy integration from other third party partners and also providing our clients a much wider and richer set of products and services they can use.

COHEN: We've also aligned our worldwide research capabilities to the requirements of this industry both in collaboration with our clients as well as collaboration with our partners.

You know, the more than six years of work that we have been doing with network equipment providers is really paying off because we are starting to see, delivered to the marketplace, the best of IBM and the best of our partners, together to serve our clients.

ARNOLD: Some of the solutions that we have created in our Telecom Solution labs include our architecture blueprint known as SPDE, the Service Provider Delivery Environment. Several solutions are based upon the SPDE framework. The solution hosted here in Montpellier is our IP Multimedia Subsystem or IMS Services plane solution.

In Austin, Texas, we have a triple play platform as well as an OSS installation, and in the lab in China we have an NGOSS implementation where we worked closely together with a Chinese partner.

COHEN: IT standards are just beginning to pervade across the entire telecommunications industry. From back office to front office, from BSS to OSS, from the business support into the network, and the ability to be able deliver new value as an industry is going to rise in heights as we move forward.

IBM, as an IT leader, as a hardware provider, a software provider and a consulting and services provider, has a great opportunity to deliver value across the period of time as I look out to the future.

IBM is the partner of innovators. IBM brings its skills, its capabilities, its resources and experiences to help our clients innovate, to pull together an ecosystem based on open standards, to be able to cause teams of companies to innovate together.

This industry is going to go through so much change, so much consolidation, so much integration, so much convergence and borrowing from other industries, that the prospects for innovation are remarkably exciting, the need for innovation is essential. IBM will be part of it all.

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