Upcoming Events, Voice Peering Forum and Sigma Systems User Conference

As requested by reader feedback, I’m providing some foresight on up-coming conferences I’m attending, rather than just reviewing conferences I’ve attended.  For June I’ll be running panel sessions at Sigma Systems‘s first user conference and at the Voice Peering Forum.

Sigma Systems‘s first user conference (June 4th-6th, Barton Creek Resort, registration is free), will explore the next generation of consumer and business oriented services, including insight and discussion around emerging trends and technology developments in the following areas:  targeted advertising, evolution of commercial VoIP & data services, global deployments in mobile broadband services, evolution to on-demand services, converged applications over video networks, data and multimedia services and IT back-office transformation.  In the OSS Consolidation article article I included Sigma Systems in the Service Fulfillment Landscape.

At the user conference I’m running the panel session “Where’s the Mobile Industry Going?” with John Namovic, Managing Partner at Deloitte; and Wedge Greene, Industry Guru.  The session’s objective is to help the audience understand how mobile is going broadband from those working on the ‘bleeding edge’ of the mobile industry. Providing a comprehensive global overview of the mobile operator’s evolution to broadband; including network evolution, new services and applications, emerging business models (MNO vs. MVNO), and review of important lessons learned.  In particular we’ll be reviewing mobile broadband services, evolution to LTE (Long Term Evolution), xVNO economics (Virtual Network Operator (where x = mobile, fixed, converged and possibly even cable)), and FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) successes and failures.

The Voice Peering Forum (June 23-24th, San Francisco), a biannual conference, brings together over one hundred unique organizations from all segments of the information technology and telecommunications industry to network and discuss the latest in peering, routing and interconnection of networks and the applications they support.  A good overview of the event is provided in this video.  I’m running a panel session on the first day entitled, “Telco 2.0 and Web 2.0: Making Money Together?”  This session will examine how the Web 2.0 paradigm is impacting telcos and how they are adapting to co-opt this paradigm to maintain service relevance in the IP-centric world.

Some of the questions we’ll be discussing in the panel are:  What is meant by Telco / Web 2.0?  What is the state of current service provider Telco 2.0 / Web 2.0 activities?  What capabilities can telcos expose that Web 2.0 companies need?  What are Web 2.0 companies doing today to bypass the telcos for various service enablers?  Where is the money to be made by the telcos and saved by the third party entities?  How are operator’s going to make these capabilities inter-operable across their network ‘islands?’  Peering 2.0!

On the panel are Mike Lee, CSO Rogers; Francesco Fraccalvieri, Head of Innovation Telecom Italia; Stefan Kuentz, Swisscom; Asha Vellaikal, Orange; and T. Ty Wang, Senior Director, Oracle.  The objective in bringing together such a senior and diverse range of panel members is to generate a diversity of insights from people at the bleeding edge of service innovation, but link it back to the brutal simplicity that for such innovation to be successful it’s got to work between operators.

I hope both panel sessions will provide some unique insights and through bringing together such senior practitioners in the industry provide an opportunity to share best practices.