Apologies for losing track of which company to credit for coining the phrase, but it was so spot-on that it's now common wisdom: "If you can't bill for it, it's not a service."
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There's a problem, though. It's now dawning big time on converged and managed service providers that, while implementing tools to rate and bill for usage, quality of service and subjective value may be necessary, which alone won't be sufficient to launch new generations of content and applications services successfully. Wisdom creep already dictates a litany of other "it's not a service" musts: "If you can't map and inventory the supporting infrastructure for it ... If you can't automate the flow of order management and provisioning tasks for it ... If you can't associate it with a specific quality of service level ... If you can't model the impact of hardware or software outages on it ... If you can't control per-subscriber access to it ... If you can't bundle it with other services..."
Few if any providers are likely to accomplish all these feats at once, but so long as the next guy has accomplished any one of them, and your own back office has not, it will be hard to say a service is a competitive service.
As a three-year veteran cable modem user and remote VPN corporate access worker, I'll say, so far, speed and capacity alone have been worth the price. That said, let me note that my provider, Comcast Corp.'s, shaky migration from the bankrupt Excite@Home infrastructure and support system, not to mention a nearly content-less home page, had me considering alternative Verizon Communications Inc. and DirecTV Inc.-branded DSL offerings more than once this past winter.
If the FCC and Capitol Hill steer things half right, the competitive field just might improve further. Even if that comes only marginally to fruition, fast transport alone will become less and less enough. Roman Pacewicz, vice president of business development for AT&T Business Services, shares another piece of common wisdom: "Transport already is virtually a commodity, and our value lies with the managed services, content and applications we can deliver over that transport."
The story is little different between business and consumer services. Even now, any time I pause for a few moments from e-mail and Web research, I find myself wondering when broadband providers will introduce new -- perhaps even easy-to-order, assured-quality -- services. Broadband affords me the luxury of clicking on a free Baltimore Orioles video highlight at ESPN's site, and I might even pay for such a thing when the Os get to the playoffs again. Yet scuttlebutt has it that Comcast soon may tag this 200-message-a-day (send AND reply) guy as a bandwidth hog and jack up my subscription fee without showing me anything new.
What will it take to give me the opportunity to pay for a videoconferencing or video-mail service that will show off my two-year-old's latest dance steps to grandpa and grandma in a window bigger than a NetMeeting postage stamp? One heck of a back office, that's what. No wonder then that national broadband ISP Speakeasy Inc., which has won the loyalty of tens of thousands of consumers with its custom service packages for online game players, prides itself on the fully automated back office it built itself. While scores of vendors in every back-office software category are burning the midnight oil to make operation support system integration and automation a reality, the ultimate job still lies in-house. Speakeasy programmers spent four years rewriting their own Perl scripts and adding XML data exchange code on top of Oracle Corp. and C+ back-office database code. Meanwhile AT&T Business Solutions programmers have spent more than two years coding their mammoth Integrated Global Enterprise Management system. It's "a central management system of systems that leverages an integration bus to plug and play" all those forward-looking vendors, Pacewicz says. That, it appears, is the daunting model for success.
The simple fact is the job just keeps looking bigger. Every deadline cycle, I have at least an inkling of the feeling: Who keeps moving that home-run fence farther and farther away? It takes a Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa to hit what baseball nuts fondly call "tape measure" homers. That's about what it will take to get into the Back-Office Hall of Fame.
