I am sure it goes further back, but the first time I remember hearing a serious discussion about ENUM was in February 2000 at the IN World Forum in Miami. Curtis Holmes, then vice president of communications software for Lucent's intelligent network unit, had just been named chairman of the forum. Today there is no IN World Forum, and Curtis Holmes is now CEO of MetaSolv Software.

Those are just two examples of how much things have changed since then. Another is that at the time, despite the proliferation of cell phones (the StarTac being all the rage) most people still had pagers clipped to their hips. This was leading to a bit of a problem with number exhaust. Working people had home phone numbers (often two), work-at-home numbers, office numbers, cell phone numbers, AccessLine numbers, pager numbers and 800-numbers tied to their pager numbers. The thought then was that this would drive the development of ENUM, which, in layman's terms, could solve the problem of individuals consuming so many phone numbers by supplying them with a single identity that could find them anywhere. The thought also was that ENUM would do the same for IP addresses and tie the telecom and Internet worlds together.

Five years later, ENUM is ready to take its bow. Last October, a group of companies, including AT&T, GoDaddy.com, MCI, SBC Laboratories, Sprint and Verizon, formed the Country Code 1 ENUM Limited Liability Co. (CC1 ENUM LLC) in order to build the public infrastructure that will promote the development of ENUM technology within the countries of the North American Numbering Plan. The group will manage the public infrastructure that translates traditional telephone numbers into Internet domain names, essentially keeping the promise of ENUM by combining capabilities of the Internet with the PSTN.

This could all be just another case of the industry saying, "Why, it won't be long before...blah, blah, blah." Or, the telephone number may be on the way to its biggest change since people recognized Fulton-8 as a prefix.

In addition to the formation of the CC1 ENUM LLC, another sign that ENUM may soon see a life outside of the standards bodies is that investors are starting to pay attention and presumably believe the time is right to invest in the technology. This week, Advanced Technology Ventures sunk another $16 million dollars into a company called Nominum, which provides a DNS hosting service called Global Name Service and recently proved carrier-class scalability on their ENUM-enabled Foundation Authoritative Name Server. The company set a benchmark for ENUM performance at 45,000 queries-per-second against 200 million customer records running on commodity hardware. That's plenty to get the party started.

The single-identity system enabled by ENUM has great potential for giving the end-user more control over incoming communications by combining emerging presence and availability capabilities in the network with a common publicly shared database of identities. It also has the ability to scare the bejeezus out of people by potentially compounding the identity theft crisis.

But as it is with all technologies, ENUM will move ahead despite the security and privacy risks, which the industry will have to address later. Still, it will be interesting to watch the last vestige of the old phone system--the telephone number--slip into history right alongside the name AT&T.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@primediabusiness.com.