“It’s about a future where we have a trillion connected devices, most of which won’t be phones, used from a trillion locations and connecting a trillion services and apps,” explains SVP of strategy Dana Porter (pictured).

By way of an example, she talks about getting into a car, and your GPS navigation software instantly connecting to your Outlook calendar to see where you’re going, then plotting the shortest route while accessing traffic data to figure out if it needs to contact the people you’re meeting and warn about possible lateness.

Anyone who read the story last week about a couple ending up in Italian industrial town Carpi rather than the sun-kissed island of Capri thanks to a GPS snafu may have a healthy distrust for any vision where technology takes this much control.

However, Amdocs’ core idea – that all your devices will be able to talk to each other and to all of the online services that you use – is seductive. The questions, of course, are who’ll make this happen, and how they’ll make money from it.

This, of course, is the reason Amdocs is talking about the Teraplay era, positioning itself as a company that can help operators (whether mobile or fixed-line – a few years down the line, the distinction will be even more blurred than it is now) make the most of all this convergence.

Are operators really wise to this kind of futuregazing, though? After all, many are still scrambling to launch their own me-too mobile app stores.

“They’re definitely all looking to experiment in that area,” says Porter.

“Look at the announcements in the market. AT&T created an emerging devices division, and Orange has also launched an M2M division for this era where all devices converge with each other. And we’re seeing initial experimentation in areas such as healthcare and logistics.”

The challenge, though, is in connecting up trillions of devices from different manufacturers. Japanese consumer electronics firms have been talking about a future where your phone talks to your TV, which talks to your PC, which talks to your toaster and so on – but their visions usually revolved around all of those devices being made by the same company.

“Right now, we basically have a bunch of solutions that are relatively closed,” admits Porter. “To get to this Teraplay era in 2015 when everything really converges, people will have to open up. The battle is over who will be managing all of this. We believe that service providers can have a key role.”

By service providers, she means operators, and points to Amazon’s Kindle as an early example, where an operator – Sprint – is there in the background providing wireless connectivity for a device that’s sold and branded as another company’s – Amazon.

Isn’t this kind of convergence what usually sparks off debate around whether Google will render traditional operators redundant?

“The old way of looking at things is who will win, Google or the service provider?” she says. “But actually, there will be many models where you will have different players taking different bits of it. But don’t forget, Google doesn’t have a relationship with end consumers – they won’t be providing call centres for all of these devices."

This is where operators come in.

"Service providers bring to the table their relationship with end consumers, and there’s a need for  someone to look at consumers across multiple devices and manage the quality of the service. Google has a crucial role to play, but it’s not the whole story.”

There’s plenty of scope for conflict though, as telecoms and tech firms jockey for position in this future. Porter says there are uncertainties for how all this affects entertainment, too, particularly when it relates to digital rights management, and how content can be shared or accessed across multiple devices.

“The key point is that we believe this Teraplay thing is actually happening,” she says.

”The enablers are in place, and networks, consumers and services are evolving fast. It will be a life-changing evolution that will peak towards 2015, and service providers will have a key role to play.”