Broadband World Forum 2010, October 26-28th, CNIT La Defense, Paris, France

With a new child at home I’ve been limiting travel, well trying to, so this year only the two most important conferences in my calendar are attended: Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Feb and Broadband World Forum (BBWF) in October.  Informa have taken over BBWF so their massive conference machine, and in particular Gavin Whitechurch, have put together a great event.  I consider BBWF to be the key event in the broadband calendar, and though not yet the scale of MWC in the mobile world, its well on its way.

The conference brochure is now available for download here.  By the numbers there will be 6000+ attendees, 280+ exhibitors, 200+ speakers, 125+ global carrier case studies & presentations.  The latter number is key, like MWC this is one of the few events operators attend.  In particular, there will be the leadership figures of:

  • DooWhan Choi, President Corporate Technology Group, Korea Telecom;
  • Mike Quigley, CEO National Broadband Network, Australia;
  • Hugh Bradlow, CTO Telstra, Australia;
  • Olivier Baujard, Chief Technology Officer, Deutsche Telekom; and
  • Dr Shyue-Ching Lu, Chairman & CEO Chunghwa Telecom.

Then more importantly from my perspective the people that make the decisions at the coal-face (in particular from my sessions):

  • Mark Hahn, Systems Architect, Verizon;
  • Christophe François, Vice President, Mobile Multimedia Products & Services, Orange; and
  • Colin Pons, Senior  Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN Telecom.

I show below the two sessions I’ll be chairing at the event.  The SDP session will have Mark from Verizon and Colin from KPN presenting their experiences.  On the panel session will be the presenters and Ty from Oracle and Lucia from Huawei.  I’ve known all for most of this decade, they are the leading implementers and thinker in this space, so we’re going to have a stimulating discussion to say the least on the first day.

On the last day of the conference is a session I think will be great fun: Developer Communities and Service Innovation.  Mark, Colin and Christophe from Orange will be giving rapid fire ‘elevator pitches’ on what they’re doing, then with Varun Arora (CEO HomeCamera, winner of last year’s InfoVision Award) and Sean O’Sullivan (CTO Dial2do) we’ll have a frank and open discussion between operators and developers.
Tuesday 26th Oct 1430-1545: Service Delivery Platform Evolution Revolution, Convolution, Amalgamation, Elimination or Virtualization?
Examining the impact the confluence of several critical technologies / developments have on the SDP such as: cloud computing / managed services; and open initiatives such as Joint Innovation Labs, GSMA’s OneAPI, OMTP’s BONDI, Open IPTV Forum, and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative).  Reviewing key trends in operators’ requirements and their competitive environment as web and telco converge. Present a view on the current and likely future evolution of the SDP: will it change, get more complex, will silos finally consolidate, or will it simply go away?

14.30 Chairman’s Introduction

14.35 Verizon’s SDP Experience – Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon, USA
Verizon is the leading converged operator with one of the largest IPTV deployments in the world of 3M subscribers in Q1 2010, and a mobile customer based of 93M customers. Their Service Delivery Ecosystem (SDE) is fundamental to Verizon’s vision of services available across all its networks. Verizon’s service vision results in customers considering their services as independent of a particular device and network: whether it be mobile, broadband or legacy networks. Services will be able to access common and shared infrastructure such as an identity management framework; finally removing multiple logons and conflicting security settings which plague most multiplatform services today.

14.55 KPN’s SDP Experience – Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN, Netherlands
KPN vision is to provide services to any device on any network at anytime. Eventually, it moves to “Everything-is-a-Service” model. From a user perspective consistent, on-par (Apple setting the bar) UX is one of the most important buying (and usage) motivation. Customer satisfaction efforts demand co-operation/partnership with others in the value chain, among which are (independent) developers, VARs, users, verticals, etc. Hence, services will encompass assets and capabilities from many different sources. Critical for this paradigm is fulfillment(including activation, registration, log-on), assurance and billing.

15.15 Panel Discussion: SDP Evolution
• Discussion of issues raised in the the presentations with the audience.
• Are SDPs relevant in a web-centric delivery model?
• Will the multiple SDP silos across mobile, IPTV, legacy and broadband converge?
• Are there gaps in the current standards?
Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon
Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN
Lucia Gradinariu, Chief Market Strategist, Consumer Software and Services, Huawei Software Company
Ty Wang, Senior Director, Oracle Communications Business Unit, Oracle

15.45 Networking Break & Exhibition Visit

Thursday 28th Oct 1430-1545: Aligning to Developer Needs Using Developer Communities to Lead the Service Innovation Race
2009 was the year of the app store and developer community.  In 2010 how are we doing as an industry? This session brings together the leading developer community managers with leading developers to frankly discuss what’s worked and how to improve upon what has been achieved.

14.30 Chairman’s Introduction:

14.35 Verizon’s Application Network Interface and Open Development Initiative: Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon
Verizon is working to tap into the innovative energy of their customers, suppliers, and partners; and to leverage the combined power of IMS, the Web, and attached devices/networks. They have defined an Application-to-Network Interface (ANI) to expose key enablers (location, presence, conference, profile, address book, etc.) such that they are easily incorporated by developers into innovative new services; examples include Verizon’s Open Development Initiative (ODI) and Verizon’s Developer Community (VDC).

14.45 Case Study: Orange Partner: Christophe Francois, VP Multimedia Services and Head of Orange Partner
Orange wants to play a stronger role in the applications eco-system. Its Orange Partner program is being reshaped to offer an end-to-end set of services and a comprehensive Toolbox combining various APIs for developers wanting to use the Orange Application Shop as a distribution channel for their apps.

14.55 Practical aspects of Operators 3rd Partner Development Initiatives: Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN
In theory asking a third party to create a service for your network for free sounds quite appealing from an operator’s perspective. But for the developer is it really that interesting? This presentation will explore the practical challenges operators face in working with developers / third parties. What are the viable business models? Can an operator simply copy Apple? And if not, what should be their model?

15.05 Panel Discussion:
What are Developers’ needs?
• Why haven’t operator developer communities taken off like Apple or Android?
• What should / can an operator do to change the situation?
Varun Arora, Co-Founder and CEO of HomeCamera
Christophe Francois, VP Multimedia Services and head of Orange Partner
Sean O’Sullivan, CTO, Dial2do
Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN
Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon

15.45 Networking Beak & Exhibition Visit