A look back at the 2009 B/OSS Conference & Expo:
Business and operations support systems are not part of the physical realm when it comes to networking, but they took a lofty leap into the near metaphysical when IBM chief scientist and information management guru, Jeff Jonas, took the stage at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo last week.
Jonas redefined the meaning of context and explained how information can be relevant one minute and irrelevant the next, depending on many factors coincidentally within the network operators’ control. Developing a crucial and complete view of the customer is not solved by how much data you collect, he said, but by how you think about, use and commingle that data.
“The smartest your organization can ever be is the sum of its perceptions,” Jonas said. And perceptions change.
Jonas’ talk was an intellectual highlight among several fine cerebral moments across all conference keynote addresses. Another was when Rob Rich opened the portal to his brain for 40 full minutes and let us climb inside his world of business and technology acumen, which made his a rather metaphysical experience as well.
Rich, managing director of TM Forum’s Transformation Information Resource Center, recommended more books than Oprah Winfrey, such as Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, and quoted from them as the student of business he is. Rich’s optimism for the revenue potential and lifestyle promises of new technology was contagious. However, they won’t come without effort, he said. For companies to succeed, the ecosystem must succeed. And for the ecosystem to succeed, the value chain must succeed. That’s going to take some work.
Another component required for all this potential to be realized, said BT’s Maria Pardee in her keynote address, is open innovation. Polished and professional, Pardee spoke of open source and open innovation not as a technologist hell-bent on openness for its own sake, but as managing director of global integration for a company that has seen it work and has based its future on the approach’s success.
Pardee pulled no punches and did not flinch from using telecom’s most accursed word: open. And she warned service providers in the audience, with a smile, “If you put your profitability on your own source code, I promise you, you won’t be here in 10 years.”
On the exhibition side of the conference, many attendees took advantage of a new program offered this year for establishing networking meetings with exhibitors. This program proved to be very successful and will be brought back next year. The Virgo team pre-scheduled more than 100 confirmed meetings for attendees, who were generally pleased with their investment as were the exhibitors with whom they met.
Embarq CIO, Vercie Lark, and Stratecast senior consulting analyst Karl Whitelock, formed a tag team to close out the show. Lark provided real-world examples of the on-demand future his company is preparing for and was forthright in discussing his needs for getting there. Karl “Perspective” Whitelock combined new research with perspectives from the event itself as well as ongoing technology trends into his closing remarks and in doing so laid out the priorities and capability requirements for the next generation of BSS and OSS.
In between, revealing case studies were offered by service providers such as AT&T, Embarq, and RCN Metro. Varied panel discussion ranged from Open Source OSS to the need for enhanced product catalogs and from the harsh realities of PCI Compliance to the razzle-dazzle of the Content Encounter where The TM Forum’s Jim Warner led a panel of experts on the still merging and emerging communications, media and entertainment industry. It also was good to welcome the IMS/NGN Forum and ATIS as active participants in the show. As we reinvigorate the OSS portion of the B/OSS event, we’re hoping the Home Networking Forum recently launched by ATIS will play a big role. |
