 We're here at the ITU studio in Geneva and I'm very pleased to be joined by Tony Poulos who is market strategist for TM Forum. Tony, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. It's a pleasure, Pax. I'd like to start off by asking you a little bit about TM Forum and also about the fact that you're going to be at the ITU Telecom World 2013 in Bangkok and you're going to be moderating there as well. So perhaps you can tell us a little bit about where you're from and what you do and also about your presence at Telecom World. Certainly, well, the TM Forum is an industry body, worldwide industry body with about over a thousand members at the moment, nearly all the major telcos in the world are members. And our role is primarily to provide the business process standards and the help telcos to operate more efficiently. That's our main goal and our members all contribute to that process. We work together in collaboration and we come up with standards that most people use. And my role there is to determine where the market is going and how we as an organization meet the needs of our members. And you're going to be attending Telecom World 2013? I am. I have a panel, I'm moderating a panel there with some very, very good panelists involved and we'll be talking about the digital world and the effect the digital economy is having on the telcos and the telco industry in general. Now before we get to Telecom World, I want to ask you a few questions really. Just about the digital landscape at the moment. How it's going to be evolving over the coming years and what does it mean for service provider IT? Well, the digital landscape, you know everything is going digital and anything that can go digital will be digital very shortly. Enterprises and consumers are both radically embracing the digital world. They want everything immediately. They want to be connected all the time. We have enterprises looking at their IT departments being becoming part of the cloud or going out to the cloud, which we'll probably talk about in more detail later. But for the service providers, they're expected to provide all the network services and all the connectivity. And I think that it's underestimated just what a critical role that is. So telcos all around the world, both fixed line, broadband and mobile, are really working heavily towards improving their networks, making them more efficient, making them more agile and being able to provide that connectivity that everyone is going to depend on. And what strategies are major service providers pursuing in terms of centralization, virtualized services and cloud? Well, they're looking at centralizing, of course. They're trying to get their main IT infrastructure centralised so they can control a broader spread of their network. So it's a catch-22. But when we talk about centralizing, we're probably talking more about things like SDN and NFV, you know, software defined networks are coming in, network function virtualization, the cloud in general. They're expecting to be offering those services as well. So not only are they doing the connectivity part, they're looking at providing the infrastructure that others can host on and work with. So for them, it's a very radical change in process. And they are, they have inherited legacy systems over the years and they're looking at improving those and coming up out of their past and providing this wonderful IP infrastructure that everyone will need in the digital world. I'd like to ask you, what are the key business models and digital services to watch and what will these services demand from IT? Well, I think cloud services are going to be very important. And we're seeing more and more people virtualizing their own networks, using services from other places and other providers. They don't want to maintain their IT in-house. So they're looking at spreading that load and making it more efficient, more economical in many cases as well. But for the telcos, they also have to take on that challenge. And this view of the digital world, will they provide the digital services, things like connectivity for motor cars, health? We're talking about e-health as a major issue in many of the developing countries, particularly, who will provide that? Will the telco want to do that themselves or will they partner with others? Now logically, the partnering model is the one that they'll be going for. And they are now changing the way they work. And they have these multi-faceted business models, whereas before they used to provide just voice and messaging. Now they're providing all these other services, either on their own or in conjunction with partners. And that's a radical change in thinking and also a radical difference in the way they operate their own business and their networks. Finally, I'd like to ask you, where must the industry collaborate if it is to be part of an open and vibrant digital world? Well, at the moment, we're very concerned as an industry about over-the-top players, as they're called, using our network services to provide their own customers. And we're feeling a little bit we're providing and investing more and more in the network infrastructure and maybe not benefiting from it. Our voice revenues are going down in the industry, but our data revenues are not going up an equivalent amount. So we're looking at working more closely with those over-the-top players, providing specific applications for the market and working with them. We have to do that. We can't be on our own. Otherwise, we could fall in the trap of becoming a utility and people just using our networks and we're not getting any of the value out from it. So telcos are changing their mentality and it's a radical change in thinking, but they are going digital and they're working much better these days than they were in the past. And it's one of the points we will be bringing up in our panel in Bangkok, I'm sure. Tony Pulitz, well, thank you very much for sharing that with us today and very much look forward to catching up with you in Bangkok. You will. Thanks very much, Max.