Speaking at the Internet Telephony Conference in Los Angeles, Fiorina said the industry needs to restructure from being vertical silos of technology to horizontal, collaborative partnerships. After all, she said, when it comes to IP communications, customers are in charge.
It used to be that providers were in charge and regulators spent their time trying to protect customers from providers, Fiorina said. That equation has totally reversed. Customers will demand the solution to whatever their problem is and they have enough choices out there and enough people to help them solve their problem that they drive industries together, competitors together and service offerings together.
Fiorina, who spent nearly 20 years at AT&T and Lucent before heading HP, pointed to a trio mega-trends in the VoIP industry, which she said are driving what customers are asking for, what regulators must consider and how VoIP tech vendors can add value.
Every single process and all analog content will become digital, mobile, virtual and personal, she said. She cited photography as an example, with cell phone cameras now being the industry’s most ubiquitous application. Every process is going to go that way, she said. Not at all the same pace, but it will happen.
From a regulatory point of view, this move to digital, mobile, virtual and personal would bulldoze traditional barriers of time, distance, location and, over time, wealth, power and access, she said. When the person is in charge, the boundaries that we have built regulations and businesses around have become irrelevant, she said.
Standing in the way of the transformation from physical and analog to digital, mobile, personal and virtual, are the vested interests from companies that have built businesses around physical, analogy technologies, she said.
This is the strongest barrier to this transformation; it’s not the technology or what the customers want, it’s the current industry’s infrastructure, she said.
The second biggest trend in VoIP, which telco and computing industry veterans struggle to deal with, is a move from vertical specialization and integration to horizontal distribution and collaboration, she said.
That includes vertical chains of command, in which decisions flowed up and down, the most common organization structure in US enterprises. To serve customers well, always, always, always you have to go outside those lines of vertical chains of command, she said.
She said HP moved to what it called a total customer experience, because we couldn’t organize vertically around a customer.
While the IP telephony industry understands that technologically and with services bundles and billing, Fiorina said, I don’t think we yet understand its implications for how people actually operate, how do we manage, how do we regulate and, of course, how do we take advantage of opportunities in serving customers.
She called for horizontal collaboration between IP communication technologies, services, industries and people. That horizontal collaboration between people is the most difficult, she said. A new kind of collaboration and leadership is required.
Earlier in her keynote, Fiorina cited HP’s acquisition of Compaq, which she led, as an example of industries and services merging to meet customers’ demand.
When asked whether she would have done anything different in her leadership of the HP-Compaq merger, Fiorina answered that she would do the merger all over again.
The fact that I am standing here no longer as chairman of HP has nothing to do with the success of the merger, she said. It has to do with a disagreement about a board’s role whether a board or a management team should run a company. And it has to with a bond of trust being broken … when certain board members talked privately and then spoke to the media.
Fiorina also said that if there were a way to better prepare the market for the merger she would have done so. I didn’t know how to do it then and I don’t know how to do it now.
Fiorina talked at length on why customers in IP-based communications are king.
Because they have seen a glimpse of what’s possible. Because of all the options they have. This is also generational … the next generation coming up will not tolerate even what we tolerate because – we know this – if they can’t get it themselves, if it’s not provided to them, they will figure out how to go get it.
She called for the IP communications industry and regulators to build technologies and a framework for customers to be able to connect globally. She said the US would, over time, lag other countries on its communications competitiveness.
We’re behind because we’re such a large country where people can spend their entire life and be very successful commercially without ever leaving our shores — but that time is coming to an end.
Being global in the IP communications industry is inevitable, inexorable, a requirement for anyone who wants to play, she said. Stop thinking nationally and start thinking globally.
Also, because IP communications regulators can’t keep up with the pace of technology, they should think more about the floor, and not the ceiling, she said. Within three months she said legislation or regulation of the technology’s applications or ceiling becomes obsolete.
So what’s the floor? The bare minimum set of things we should do to enable consumers rather than protect them, she said.
To build that floor, regulators must create incentives and removing barriers to companies investing in technologies that are going to make a difference, Fiorina said. She pointed to better consumer protection for users of online services as an example.
Without that change, Fiorina said the US would not prosper and be competitive in IP communications, which said are incredibly powerful tools to build the nation’s economic wealth. She pointed to Korea as having the IP communications infrastructure for competitiveness, which is different to the US.
