Even casual observers have to notice the dramatic changes in the telecommunications industry that have taken place in the last five years. Giant companies split, merge and are sometimes displaced by newer ones that did not exist a decade ago. The business of running the mighty circuit-switched telephone network is under constant assault on one side from packet networks and on the other side from the bewildering array of wireless networks. Service providers compete for customer sometimes with no network infrastructure at all.

The implications of these business and technological changes on software development in the telecommunications industry are not subtle. Communications networks depend for every aspect of their operation on software. Traditional software engineering for networks in turn depends on assumptions about platform and requirement stability, development and deployment processes, interoperability constraints and business-technical tradeoffs that are increasingly difficult to achieve. In this talk, I will give a personal view of the kinds of problems that will need to be solved by telecommunications software developers to remain competitive. Many of my examples come from Telcordia's experience in transforming its software processes and assets over the past five years.