Mapping and explaining the developing relationship between telecom and e-commerce will be Chris King, a Pacific Bell veteran who makes his home in and around Silicon Valley.

Chris spent 14 years in Pac Bell's IT organization as a programmer, database administrator, system planner, and project manager.

After stints in the network inventory function, order entry, billing, network service activation, and network surveillance, he eventually assumed a key executive position as Director of OSS for PacBell's broadband network.

Then in 1996, Chris was hired away by BEA Systems, a leading e-commerce and enterprise integration software company. BEA was in its formative years back then, and telecom was quickly emerging as its strongest vertical industry.  So the company turned to Chris to ensure that its products continued to meet the needs of this vital and growing customer base.

As BEA's director of telecom industry marketing, Chris serves primarily as a liaison between BEA's product engineering group and its worldwide telecom customers.

In his Expert Briefing, Chris begins by walking you through the basics of e-commerce, explaining why the technology-savvy telecom industry has nonetheless become a bit of a laggard in the e-commerce world.

This Is How You'll Be Helped By This Road Warrior Briefing #7:

The Internet may be out of favor on Wall Street right now, but no one's denying that the Net is certain to take up a large spot on the Agenda when your company's future is being discussed.

Most telcos are out of the starting blocks in the e-commerce race, but they're trailing the leaders in other industries by a fairly large margin. In this Expert Briefing, Chris King shows you why our industry has been slow to respond to the e-commerce challenge. It's part legacy systems, partly due to the nature of our products, and partly owing to the fact that our services are not universally available within our territories.

All these things complicate our cyber aspirations.
Of course, this Briefing goes far beyond clarifying what's been holding us back - it explains exactly what's needed in order to make the Net work for your company. 

Because OSS integration must be front and center in any coherent Net effort, this Briefing transitions into a journey through the Enterprise Application Integration forest.

The big picture and the small details - both are here.


Table of  Contents

• Telecom Meets the E-Commerce Challenge
• The Stages of E-Commerce Maturity
• Telecom's E-Commerce Albatross
• The Real-Time Subscription Nature of Telecom Service
• Intelligent Order Filtering by Service Reps
• The Components of a Telecom E-Commerce System
• The Role of EAI in E-Commerce
• How EAI Does a Credit Check
• Query-and-Response vs. Fire-and-Forget
• Where Telecom Organizations are Applying EAI
• Simplifying the Move to E-Commerce
• The Technical Challenges of Telecom Enterprise Integration
• Eliminating Pair-Wise Integration
• The API Migration Problem and XML
• Why Software Vendors Want to Migrate to XML
• Buying & Selecting EAI Tools & Services
• EAI Adapters vs. Vendor Track Records
• Choosing Price or EAI Tool Robustness