For 2007 this column promises three things:

We promise: Not to harp on about people, plans, positions and situations ‘going forward’.  

 In  the coming year we’ll take a positive approach to meaningless window-dressing drivel.  The CMA will collect and publish the best of the worst - so keep a sharp lookout and let us know. 

This fag-end of the festive season we kick off ‘Hypespot07’ with a cracker left over from last year.  We are assured that the two over-arching principles for deployment of BT’s 21CN are, (wait for it):  ‘We plan for a smooth transition’ and ‘We plan to act responsibly’.  Hurrah.  Impressive stuff.  I’m sure they felt the need to tell us this.  

We promise:  Not to complain about not being consulted.

Hands up all those readers who didn’t respond to Ofcom’s recent consultation on how they run their consultations.  Quite so.  

There is an alternative to wading through Ofcom’s long and impenetrable consultation documents.  There’s no need to puzzle out where the market theorists and consultants seem to have got it ever so slightly (or completely) wrong.  Join forces with CMA’s regulatory experts to find out what it all means and what can be done about it.    

We might even be able to let you know if/when the industry regulator takes any notice of the responses – more often than you might imagine.  You have nothing to lose - except your future business prospects.

We promise: To rant about innovation like there was no tomorrow.

For most businesses in this sector there will be no tomorrow without innovation. And there will be no innovation if the only voices that are heard are those unimaginative giants who quite like standing still or don’t know the difference between galloping and Galapagos.   

Next Generation communications management is all about being alive, being switched on to new opportunities, and being connected to a wider and increasingly unwired world.  If the Channel cannot see, cannot articulate, or cannot deliver the business case for fibre to the premises then we can hardly expect some fairy godmother to deliver better than shoestring broadband Britain.    

So-called ‘industry experts’ say they cannot understand why anyone would want all that bandwidth  Repeating three times that UK has brilliant broadband doesn’t make it true but it sounds more authoritative - especially if no-one points out that the emperor’s not wearing any clothes.  2007 – the year of triple play or triple failure?

In 2007 this column will report what’s in the mind of CMA members – the big corporates, the SME’s and the public sector network managers  - a membership that collectively spends a cool £13bn on this stuff every year. 

It used to be said that Academics knew how to collaborate and businesses knew how to compete.  Our next generation world has turned that upside down.  Academics have learned to compete, Businesses have learned to collaborate – and CMA members have learned that they need diverse and well-qualified channel partners, systems integrators and application providers to make sense of it all.

Happy New Year

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First published in Comms Business, January 2007