At a recent meeting with a European telecommunciations incumbent, we were faced with an interesting situation: The telco’s existing DSL network and the associated infrastructure was complex and fragile enough for it to be both technologically risky and unreasonably expensive to upgrade existing systems to carry an IPTV service.

Our solution: Run the IPTV project as an internal greenfield operation, managed by Industria but owned by the telco. Set the performance criteria (functional specs) and do it within the time and budget constraints. Simple!

In any technological environment it will inevitably become more and more complicated to do everything within one system, so by hooking up the different subsystems through a good services platform, we can have the best of both worlds: Harnessing the power of the existing infrastructure when deploying new services, without the hassle of messing with unrelated systems.

In techspeak, it’s like a Service Oriented Architecture approach to business. When the subsystems / services rely on one another through well-defined interfaces, they can be independently upgraded and improved without breaking any business processes: A recipy for fast market reaction times and efficient network operation - which no longer need to be polar opposites.