DALLAS — Hardware innovation has been building the networks of the 21st century, but only software flexibility can allow us to fully take advantage of their capabilities. That's the consensus the telecom industry's network and service management experts seemed to reach while at the TeleManagement World Americas show in Dallas last week.

The show's organizer, the TeleManagement Forum, began life almost 20 years ago as a group promoting interoperability between products that managed the network hardware. Now, as the TMF focuses on service management and whatever lies beyond, its constituents are making it clear what still needs to be done.

“Customer care will improve as you come to allow customers to call one number for all services and troubles,” said Keith Cambron, president and CEO of AT&T Labs, in a keynote speech. “Network management systems have become easier to design and maintain, but service management systems are still too numerous and too specialized, and that's what we have to work on the next few years.” He added, “We haven't yet seen the progress in software design that we have seen in network.”

Exhibitors on the show floor echoed those comments. “The first 100 years of the telecom industry were about hardware. The next 100 years will be about software,” said Matt Price, vice president of CA's Wily Technology division.

But if network hardware has been milked for efficiencies, and the same is to happen in the software segment, then a consolidating industry may have its work cut out for it in the future. Cambron, whose parent company's acquisition of BellSouth is still pending, noted the integration challenges such deals bring.

But it's not only carriers that face that challenge. Major software firms like CA, IBM and Oracle are acquiring smaller software specialists to gain functional breadth.

“We're at the point in the network evolution where the reliability of data services is as good or better than voice,” Cambron said, “but when a customer says, ‘I can't get a service quickly enough because of these legacy systems,’ that is a problem we should be able to solve.”