At today’s VON show in Miami, I had the chance to question key note speaker Fred Briggs of Verizon on their plans to open up APIs into their network.  Unlike most large carrier speakers, I really enjoyed hearing him.  During his talk, Fred mentioned two aspects of Verizon’s forward looking business plans: Unified Communications and Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP).  Needless to say, I was quite excited to hear that Verizon could spell CEBP, never mind that they would even talk about it on a stage.  As you might recall, Verizon announced over the summer that they were offering a new computing as a service offering (which, although flawed in the practice, was excellent in theory). I thought to myself, “Wait! Maybe they’re going to open up the APIs to the core too!”  Anyone involved in the CEBP game knows that an API to the core services was fundamental to success. Period.   But for Verizon? Ummmm, not so much.

Well, what Fred said was that Verizon was making a commitment to open up it’s network with API access, but that there were equipment issues that might cause delays. (Alex Doyle from Broadsoft was in the audience, and I wish I had taken the opportunity to ask Verizon to commit to further purchases of Broadsoft equipment simply to hurry their API efforts along.  A missed opportunity.)  When I mentioned that Deustche Telekom, BT and Orange all had open API efforts and that Verizon was lagging behind them, Fred took some exception to that. I had to run back to my computer to double check the meaning of “lag”.

Did Verizon say that they were going to open up their core APIs? Yup. When I asked for a schedule of when that might happen… well, I’m still waiting.  And so is every other over-the-top and Telco 2.0 developer.   I think Don Thorson of Ribbit is right – in the near future of OTT telephony, there’s two sorts of carriers – the quick and the dead.