I’ve just taken on a new role with Ovum, as leader of our telecoms strategy practice, which includes our Wireline Strategy, Regulation and Wholesale advisory services. As a result, I’m in London this week meeting the new team and a few other people and trying to get to grips with things.

One of the themes that has arisen several times, and which figures to be a pretty large component of our wireline strategy research in particular is “Transformation.” This isn’t a term I’ve come across a lot in my work over the last few years in the enterprise space. But as it turns out, it refers to a set of things I’m already pretty familiar with, and in essence relates to the process through which telcos are shifting from their legacy structures, mindsets and services to new structures, processes, infrastructures, networks, services and so on. As such, it encompasses several major areas:

• Network transformation - the shift from PSTN to IP, and the introduction of IMS and common platforms in place of a raft of dedicated platforms for various different services
• A greater focus on marketing and serving customers as the core business of the telco, and a smaller focus on technology and running networks
• As a result, it often also involves the outsourcing of management of network operations to third parties, most commonly network equipment vendors. We met with representatives from Alcatel-Lucent and the CTO of Telstra as they came to visit our London office, and the Telstra CTO remarked that he’d noticed this trend was most prevalent in countries with populations under 20 million (Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and others are current examples).
• Next-generation access, or in other words fiber in the access network. FTTH, FTTN and other architectures and services are used to deliver a range of services, often as a triple play bundle of TV, telephone and Internet access.

I think what we’ll be focusing on is how carriers are approaching these various tasks and how far along they are. I imagine there might well be scope for some sort of transformation scorecard at some point which would formalize this. Telstra is actually one of the carriers which seems to be furthest along in its plans at this point, and which has a clear roadmap for achieving the rest. BT and Bell Canada are other examples of carriers which have aggressively approached at least some of the elements of transformation. I’m looking forward to embracing this as a theme in my new role. I’d be interested in your thoughts and comments on what would be useful to our customers.