The board of directors of the TeleManagement Forum voted last week to appoint current chief technology officer Martin Creaner president of the organization. Creaner said he is focused strictly on the future and spoke with Telephony's Tim McElligott about what lies ahead for the forum.

On a new direction: The whole focus on the TMF this year is that we are really at the start of the next five years, rather than the end of the last 15. We are really looking toward the way telecom and the media and Internet industries are all converging and how we get our minds around that. We are looking at how we grow our relevance, not just to our existing telco constituency, but to this new market we think will exist sometime over the next five years, which will include the cable players and the [mobile virtual network operators] like Virgin Mobile (which recently joined the forum). It also will include device manufacturers because we feel we'll be managing all the way to the device. Network management as a concept will continue to exist as a phrase, but it will mean that the device becomes part of the network.

Service providers will be managing devices in order to enhance the user experience as much as managing the pipe that gets to the user. So device manufacturers, content players like Disney or Sony, all the way to the Googles, Yahoos and Skypes — the pure-play Internet players — will essentially emerge as different constituents in a big, single industry. They'll need a level of management to deliver the telco-based content services over the Internet to the rest of the world.

And TMF has positioned itself as the management organization that will be solving the management challenges of this new industry.

On the forum's readiness for this challenge: We are at the early stage of trying to build an understanding of what we have that is relevant immediately to those industries. We need to understand the limitations of our existing [works] and expand them where they need to be expanded. It's encouraging that I see MVNOs talking about how they are using the [Shared Information Data] model and the cable companies are using the [enhanced Telecom Operations Map]. Cox, Time Warner and Virgin Mobile joined us in December, and that was great for us. It's an affirmation of the vision we see coming.

On what comes after the early stage: When we see the likes of Disney and CNN, we'll know we have really made some progress. We are getting in the door [of these companies] in terms of discussions, but to be honest, we haven't nailed down the value proposition of why they should join. The order of attack for us is to talk to them and learn and identify what we can do cooperatively.

We've signed liaison agreements recently with the Home Gateway Initiative and the Broadband Services Forum, two industry bodies that are more interested in these new areas than they would be in our present areas. But they can see the value in working with TMF because TMF has a lot of reproducible management approaches.

So we are optimistic that what we've got is applicable across these other emerging industries, but undoubtedly there is going to be an awful lot of things that will be needed in the management area that I haven't addressed, such as content management and digital rights management. [Digital rights management] is a well understood area in the content and media world, but in the context of mass-market delivery, it is a different challenge that isn't fully understood. Watching the telco industry trying to be relevant to these other industries right now is like watching your dad dance at the disco.

So we are going to put together a program to talk to these companies directly to understand the limitations of, say, the eTOM in relation to the cable world. We'll put quite a lot of effort in broader relationship building.

TELEPHONY TV

Watch Editor-in-Chief Dan O'Shea speak with Martin Creaner at TeleManagement World Forum 2006. www.telephonyonline.com/TV