Yet another conference in Florida. With an impending change in telecom architecture to get us into the current century comes the need to gain some sense of the current state of the industry. I am blessed with specialists in this field who know far more than I could hope to learn. Therefore I am trying to gain the forty-thousand foot view.

The industry is being driven into the open systems world with a vengeance. What formerly was a cozy little club of expensive services marketed by proprietary vendors now resembles the wild-west mentality we saw early in the personal computer era. While it's not a great time to be an incumbent vendor, there are lots of opportunities for everyone else.

It is kind of fun to see the telecom people wrestling with the same issues the data people fought out a decade or twenty years ago. They are awakening to the realization that natural selection is ruthless. Voice is now a data service. It shares the network with all those other services. It is now subject to the practices and procedures developed by IT over the past half century. It is somewhat amusing to watch some of these folks discover the new world and yell Eureka.

Contact Marvin at mpreem@gmail.com