All Things Revenue: Generation, Assurance, Optimization

Real Time, One at a Time: The New Realities of Marketing 10:45 – 11:30 a.m.
Mass market advertising has lost its effectiveness, but can micro-marketing work with a multi-million subscriber customer base? Can real-time marketing really provide instantaneous and relevant messaging? This panel of experts believe they can and will share their strategies for turning service providers into marketing powerhouses. They will discuss the data and demographics required to understand customers as well as the requirements for delivering and tracking relevant offers to the right customers at the right time.

Moderator: Larry Goldman, Head, Analysys Mason’s Global Telecoms Software Research Program
Speaker: Alice Bartram, Assistant Vice President, Marketing - Billing & Active Customer Management, Comverse
Bill Zimmer, Worldwide Solution Manager, HP
Scott Kolman, Director of Marketing, Customer Management division, Amdocs

Five Things Service Providers Can Do Now to Combat the Economy and Drive Revenue 11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Customer data is a key building block of an efficient and intelligent data management strategy. The ability to capture, analyze and act on customer data to monetize services, improve customer experience and achieve compliance is a critical differentiator in an increasingly competitive communications environment. You can unlock and optimize this valuable customer data to reduce risk and protect revenue. This session will focus on practical solutions that do not require major Capex investment in BSS such as billing & charging, customer intelligence, revenue assurance and data retention and compliance.

Moderator: Tim McElligott, Editor in Chief, Billing & OSS World
Speaker: Gautum Shah, Director, Platform Strategy and Management, Boost Mobile
Ari Banerjee, Director, Yankee Group
Kapil Raval, Customer Solution, HP Communications and Media Solutions

It Couldn’t Happen to Us: The Staggering Cost of Ignoring PCI Compliance 2 – 2:45 p.m.
In 2006, payment processing organizations banded together to create the PCI Security Standards Council and developed standards aimed at ensuring consistent data security for any application that processes, stores or transmits credit card data. By 2010 all organizations that process credit cards must use a PCI-compliant solution or face having their processing capabilities terminated. Service providers need to understand the scope of PCI and begin planning now to meet the deadline. This session will provide a comprehensive overview of PCI and what it means to service providers and their third-party billing vendors, as well as discuss the implications of non-compliance.

Speakers: Tony Bates, Partner and Chief Operating Officer, PSC
Mike Holleran, Senior Product Manager, ASP, Info Directions, Inc.

Want more on PCI Compliance? Click here to read Anita Karvé’s PCI Compliance: Merchants Cover Backs, Bottom Lines.

Outsourcing Your Data Analytics 3 – 3:45 p.m.
The ability to not only warehouse a plethora of data — literally petabytes — but to ultra-analyze that data is changing the way telecommunications service providers run their businesses, as well as where they conduct some of their back-office operations. AT&T Mobility and Teradata will provide a case study detailing how they worked together to use analytics to provide strategic data to business managers, sales teams, the finance department and marketing campaigns.

Speakers: Rebecca Wartchow, Senior Industry Consultant, Teradata
Mary B. Morris, Senior Technical Director, Corp Systems BI/DW Delivery, AT&T

Wednesday Sessions

The Transformation Panel: Innovating in Any Climate 9 – 9:45 a.m.
Recessions historically provide opportunities and it is in their midst that the seeds of the next step changes in technology and its usage are usually sown. This panel brings together service providers who have used innovative IT changes to drive their businesses forward in the past 12 months in a discussion and demonstration of how to find strategic advantages in the midst of an economic downturn.

Moderator:Alex Leslie, European Correspondent, Billing & OSS World Magazine
Speakers: Rob Ewing, Vice President of Systems Development, Intercall
Sankaranarayanan (Shanky) Viswanathan, Head of Telecom Services Unit, North America, Tata Consultancy Services
Karim Kalaawi, BDM, Partner BSS Solutions, WW Communications Sector, Microsoft Gulf FZ LLC

Data Analytics 10 – 10:45 a.m.
Data analytics can provide much more than a look in the rearview mirror to determine how your business has performed recently. The big opportunity here is making analytics work for the business by generating new opportunities and helping to determine strategic direction. This panel will discuss better ways of understanding the data that is waiting to tell you something about your customers.

Moderator: Susan McNeice, Global Program Director, Communications and Infrastructure, Stratecast
Panelists: John Heveran, Senior Vice President, Information Technology, Level 3 Communications
Naras Eechambadi, Senior Vice President, CSG Systems Quaero Solutions
Rob Vernon, Vice President, Corporate Development, CSG Systems

Thursday Sessions

Working Successfully with Systems Integrators and Telecom IT Services Firms 9 – 9:45 a.m.
In the late 1990s, pundits figured systems integrators’ glory days had passed and software would rule the future. Instead, the services market grew as telecoms became desperate to transform their businesses, cut costs and drive new revenue. Still, the make-up of today’s services firm is far from the SI of the 1990s. The new, highly diversified SIs of today thrive on fast turnaround projects, creative partnerships, hybrid software/services offerings and global outsourcing. Learn how to best leverage an SI’s skills and what kind of services firm you should hire.

Moderator: Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute (TRI)
Speakers: Rene Sotola, Vice President, Telecom Business, CGI
Shanky Viswanathan, Head of Telecom Services Unit, North America, Tata Consultancy Services
Geoffrey Knoerzer, Vice President of IT, Midwest Region, Verizon Wireless (former)
John Petrie, Vice President, Industry Business Development, Progress Software

Want more on Systems Integration? Click here to read Jim Barthold’s Fisticuffs Aside, SI Panel Promises Some Fireworks.

Value Based Pricing 10 – 10:45 a.m.
Across the industry, operators are trialing tiered pricing to reduce the effects of bandwidth hogs and guarantee service levels for customers. With the right strategies and technology in place, service providers can leverage user profiles making it possible to accurately charge for highly-personalized service packages. This presentation will arm operators with the knowledge to implement an entire policy management solution—and fine-tune their business models with fair usage controls. It also will identify the parameters that might be used to approximate the real value of the communication from the user’s perspective and examine the success of trials in various markets.

Moderator: Ari Banerjee, Analyst, Yankee Group
Speaker: Michael Manzo, Chief Marketing Officer, Openet
Will Rotch, CTO, Comverse