Telcordia Impact Players:
Dave Gorton

Unless your watch stopped, you probably realize that the long-awaited IP future recently arrived. It's hardly news to Dave Gorton, Telcordia's Executive Director of IMS Service Delivery Product Strategy. Dave saw the promise of the "network of networks" twinkling on the horizon long ago.

It couldn't come too soon for carriers, who are now able to bring together myriad devices, protocols, and applications in order to deliver new services, add more value, and boost incremental revenues.

And now, as Telcordia launches the Telcordia® Maestro™ IMS Portfolio, its ever-growing set of IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS)-ready products, services, and applications, it seems this is where Dave's professional path has been heading all along.

Dave joined Telcordia on the heels of the 1984 divestiture. Since then, he's led solution architecture and software development for Service Management Systems, Service Control Points, Application Servers and Gateways for Intelligent Network services, and IP Application Servers and Gateways for value-added services within broadband, fixed and mobile networks.

Considering his resume, it's little wonder that Dave identified the underpinnings of IP so early.

"You could see where we were heading some time ago," he says. "The era of soft switching kind of predefined this entire string of developments."

More recently, Dave became intimately involved in building the foundation for Telcordia IMS offerings.

"About 5 years ago I was managing the main platform piece of the Telcordia® ISCP® System (our influential service creation, delivery, and management platform for Intelligent Networks). My boss at the time pulled me out of that mainline development job to start looking at IP from a business prospective. By 2000, we had some prototypes for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which would become the main IMS control protocol."

Ask Dave what factors enabled Telcordia's success in the IP marketplace, and he'll tell you it's very much a matter of perspective.

"It's been largely due to having people who are looking a little further ahead than others," he explains. "Back in 1999, there was the sense that IP would take over the earth immediately. When that didn't happen, lots of companies wandered away and focused exclusively on wireless. But we took a more evolutionary view of the networks. Instead of going head over heels with IP-only solutions, we held the course with fixed, mobile, and IP. Taking that broader view positioned us well for what's happening now with convergence."

And how are carriers reacting to the IP age? "With optimism, tinged with caution," Dave says.

"IP is the great equalizer," He adds. "For carriers, that means there are both great opportunities and some challenges. They understand that IP is their ticket going forward. But they worry about substitution - getting caught having to simply offer a cheaper version of what they now offer. At the same time, there's a tremendous upside - not only in terms of greater revenue, but in terms of being able to control your network in ways you couldn't before."

Of course, a major piece of the control issue is being able to direct content to customers in meaningful ways.

"We've seen that people will pay to get the content they want in the environment they want," Dave says. "The mobile market is exploring that with ring tones and video highlights, so IMS can help control the transport and push of these pieces of content."

"I had one operator describe IMS to me as the carriers' last chance to get control of the content on their networks," Dave recalls. "That's the story we've been preaching: quality of service, control, and the ability to charge for it."

In Dave's view, the question of what customers want and what they're willing to pay for is driving the industry to a more meaningful degree than ever.

"I was boarding a plane recently from Europe and a guy asked me if I had any electronic equipment," Dave recounts. "I had a cell phone, laptop, digital camera, wireless PDA, and an MP3 player. So there's an element of trying to make sense out of all our communications. How do you screen and manage incoming messages? How do you use all your new and converging devices in ways that are actually useful? I mean, how many people truly use more than two features on their phone?"

Dave's not alone in asking these questions, as Telcordia – and the entire industry – tries to get into the mind of the individual telecom consumer.

"There has been a shift for us," Dave admits. "We started out serving the operators who designed services, and now we're trying to better understand the customers who are supposed to use them. My goal now is to get to the point where our products really can serve these individual 'markets of one.' We're getting better at hitting the larger segmented markets, but if we got it down to a personal level and allowed customers to self-manage their communications, that would be the next great wave."