Marriage of IT and telecomm will create more job opportunities

What better proof point that IT and telecommunications are rapidly merging and evolving into a new industry segment than the fact that IBM is positioning itself for the change over through recent acquisitions in the last 18 months, and the coming introduction of new products and services.

If you want to think of IBM as a giant aircraft carrier that needs to turn itself around you may do so. But give them credit for this. The captain and his officers understood it was needed and started making preparations for a mid-course correction years ago.

It’s not telecomm and it’s not IT. Perhaps IP Telecom or IT telecomm is a better name for it but whatever you call it over the next several years we will see a rapid transformation until the old telecommunications industry is in fact absorbed as another arm of high tech.

Micromuse was a leader in telecommunications network management space, in fault management as well as fixed and IP performance management.

Vallent was a global leader in wireless performance management and in telecommunications service quality.

IBM acquired both.

The result will appear in the first half of 2008 as Netcool Software, from IBM’s Tivoli service arm that targets both the customer experience and service assurance.

Prior to these acquisitions, IBM focused in two primary areas in telecommunications, the service delivery platform [SDP] and in telecommunications transformation projects.

SDP helps define and deliver the new services now made possible over IP such as multimedia, wireless, presence, social networking, concierge and map information and all of the advertising components that are now enabled along with it.

But it was in service assurance for the telecomm industry–insuring all the hardware was working properly with optimized performance– that IBM lacked a strong presence.

IP and IT services together bring to the telecomm market something the telecommunications industry never felt the need to do before, create a significant number of new services for the market and to expedite their launch.

In the world of high tech, unlike the old telecomm world, consumers have a very short attention span and companies had better be ready with the next new thing and the next one after that in rapid fire order.

IBM is already working with the likes of Sprint in the U.S. and Deutche Telekom in Europe to make the transformation over to IP.

IBM’s Kieran Moynihan , vice president and CTO Telecoms, at IBM’s Tivoli software tells me IBM realized about three years ago that the telecomm, IT and media worlds were coming together. They looked at their own assets, strong in SDP and IT management, and decided they needed to strengthen their presence in telecommunications in the service assurance space, the management of the equipment, the base stations, switches, and so on, all of which now needs a new management layer as IP plays a role.

So, IBM’s strategy is meant to become the single, one stop shop solution provider, therefore pushing aside companies like HP for IT and telecomm service and Accenture as a system integrator or Oracle and HP in the SDP market.

This strengthens Big Blue in the linkage between the service layer and the creation of new services.

Even if this gives IBM a preeminent position in the short term, it probably won’t last long. Not much of a head start is my guess.

The combining of telecomm, IP, and media will attract giants from both industries, IT and telecommunications, like Nortel, Nokia and Siemens. Of course Cisco might be considered a hybrid with feet in both worlds already.

My guess is this new addition to the high tech family or new industry if you will, will not only force telecommunications geeks to learn new tricks but it will also require the learning of new skills on the part of IT professionals.

It will I believe become the new gold rush with plenty of employment opportunities for software and hardware engineers in this country and around the world.