One of the real challenges of a telecom trade show is making technology look sexy. That’s one reason why video images and IPTV will appear to dominate the NXTcomm08 show floor -- this is not only a hot market but an easy way to demonstrate core capabilities of a telecom network including bandwidth, reliability and quality.

But at NXTcomm08 in Las Vegas, look beyond the glitz of the big high-definition movie screens playing last year’s hottest action movies (I’m guessing Spiderman and Pirates of the Caribbean will still dominate) to two another predominant trends: IT/Communications convergence and managed services for businesses.

Increasingly, the technology deployed in telecom networks looks a lot like the technology deployed in corporate networks. It’s built on a bigger scale, and has more built-in redundancy, but much of what is being deployed today either originated or took its inspiration from the IT world.

Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of Telus, who is giving not one but two keynote presentations this week, has aggressively moved his company into the IP realm and now faces new challenges as a result.

“We have what we call subscriber convergence -- using multiple services which entail technologies that are a bit new, and involves people who know IT technologies but have network DNS, which is a small breed of people at Telus and at other companies,” Gedeon said. “We need people with different sets of skills than we have had in the past and the universities are probably 10 years behind what we are doing.”

Telus has used “a lot of IT technologies to bring the price down, like we use Ethernet, and a lot of technologies are being leveraged across multiple platforms, some of which are IT-based,” he added. “We are not getting dedicated hardware, we are getting generic hardware, customer software. There is a small breed of people that do understand these things, so we have a people challenge.”

In addition, Telus and other service providers have to figure out how to better benefit from the “massive transformation that we call Telus 2.0.” The company won’t see the savings until it can fix its processes, not just its plumbing, Gedeon said. “And we have to provide the customization and the privacy that our customers want, at the some time.”

There are answers to some of these challenges that will be on display at NXTcomm08 -- but you’ll have to stop watching Johnny Depp and Tobey McGuire long enough to find them.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.