B/OSS World: BT's Pardee Urges Telcos to Get Behind Open Source

Now is the time to branch into open source. That was the assertion from Maria Pardee, managing director of global integration for BT in her keynote address Tuesday at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo.

She said the open development environment is where innovation resides. By way of example, she cited that there are some 25,000 apps for the iPhone and more than 20 are added a day. The software development kit “is what’s changing our industry,” she said.

The challenge is adapting to this new model, but adapt you must. “If you put your profitability on your own source code, I promise you you won’t be here in 10 years,” Pardee said.

This is no easy pill to swallow for executives who have been at their posts for decades and used to the OS being part of the intellectual property, the differentiator for the company.

To illustrate how that model no longer makes sense, Pardee explained the concept of “crowd sourcing,” which BT helped enable for Pfizer. The drugmaker used to have a team of 35 or so R&D specialists. But they transformed the model by enabling any competent stakeholders to register and contribute to development. Some 47,000 registered, cutting down R&D costs 97 percent and increasing production five-fold.

She posed the question: Can telcos get a better product if we put it out to the world rather than just the telecom engineers?

“It’s a step change in how you do R&D,” she said, and added that it’s also recession-proof. There’s no need to put off innovation because of capex constraints using this open approach, she said.

So how do you keep your competitive advantage when you give away your source code? Pardee said innovation and trust. She explained that customers have expectations for their experience with the telco brand that will differentiate them from upstarts. “You are not losing your IP, but allowing yourself to expand your market and your relationship with the customer, she said.

You no longer have legacy cost structures and you are able to help customers leverage new business models.

From a practical standpoint, Pardee advised OSS professionals to get their companies on board the same way they would customers: by showing it as a balance sheet changing initiative.

Besides, she said, if you don’t do it, where can you expect the industry to be in five years when companies like Apple and Google are moving ahead full steam?