The Billing & OSS World Expo Blog

By Tim McElligott

Bring your tea bags. Bring your weed. Bring your sidearms. Bring your hand-painted signs. Bring your school buses, your bullhorns, your bandanas and fanny packs. Whatever gets you fired up and ready to demand change. But most of all, bring your laptops, your interoperability issues, your automation dreams, your questions and your open minds. ‘Cuz we’re forming a March on Washington you won’t want to miss.

We’re not stupid, though. We’re going to wait until it’s warm outside. Our March is scheduled for June – June 9th through the 11th to be exact. And we’re not marching on the Capitol. We won’t be shouting down the fuzz in front of the White House. That’s for gays and lesbians, for defenders of civil rights, for union organizers, war protesters and environmentalists.

We’re going to the Gaylord.

The Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center is the site of the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo 2010. And we’re going to march right up there and ride those gleaming escalators. We’re gonna rise up in those glass and brass elevators and head straight for the long rows of cloth-covered tables where warm coffee and the sugar rush from sweet rolls will energize our minds and prepare us to absorb the nuances of software-based solutions to the business and competitive challenges of telecommunications. We’ll question every Power Point. We’ll drill every one of the 80 or more subject-matter experts who dare to claim they have found the answers. We’ll make them show us the data.

You don’t go to Washington thinking there’ll be no demonstrating. Did Jacob Coxey march all the way from Massillon, Ohio to Washington. D.C., in March of 1894 with 100 other men to protest the loss of jobs because he didn’t plan to demonstrate? Did a quarter of a million civil rights demonstrators in the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” march on Washington in August of 1963 because they didn’t plan to demonstrate?

Oh we’ll demonstrate. You want to see how the proper use of a zipcode can save you thousands of dollars? Pitney Bowes Business Insight will demonstrate that. Need to see a demonstration on how to take an idea for a single service and turn into five real ones in a matter of weeks? CHR Solutions will demonstrate that. Want a demonstration on transpromo? See OSG Billing Solutions. Want one on fulfillment? On order management? We’ll have demos for that.

And speaking of 1963. We may not have Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to deliver an “I Have a Dream” speech, but we have a few folks who have been to the mountaintop of telecom and will deliver some spirited oratory themselves: Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO at Telus; Joe Weinman, director of strategy and business development at A&T Business Solutions; Debra Osswald, global communication industry strategy leader at IBM, to name a few.

Every group that marches on Washington puts their own spin on the numbers: The Million Man March being a prime example. So we expect to fall in somewhere between Jacob Coxey’s Army of 500 and the 1979 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights which drew at least 75,000. Only you can control how big this thing gets.

So beginning next week you can take a look at the initial agenda for the big march at www.billingworldexpo.com. Remember, this year we are collocating with VON. They’ll join the march and bring their IP packets and their signs declaring unified communications and their little Skype attachments and maybe their own weed and fanny packs. So it could be a rockin’ good time. Join us.

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.