7 Strategies for 3 Goals in 2007
What were your New Years resolutions? Hopefully, they included three important goals for the coming year: Embrace the new field of content and enhanced applications, ramp up marketing efforts, and find a better way to beat the ILECs at their own game.
Todays 7 in 07 track at COMPTEL PLUS will tackle each of these issues, arguably the most important goals for competitors in the coming year.
Clearly, for our wholesale segment, there are lots of new opportunities to tap into this year, said Judy Reed Smith, CEO at analyst firm ATLANTIC-ACM. She will moderate all three sessions in the track. Content and video will create a wonderful increase in broadband needs. Electronic media, such as Webinars, eBooks and online commerce, are presenting a mass personalization of customer interaction. And, theres a clear sense that CLECs will have to do more than just resell the same wire over and over. So these are the things we will be focusing on during this event.
The morning will kick off with 7 Ways to Embrace New Technology in 2007, which will take a look at the burgeoning content and applications space. Innovative services and access to content are the next generation of business opportunities. On the applications side, social networking and user-generated content are exploding. Meanwhile, multinetwork, multidevice strategies are beginning to come to fruition: witness AT&T Inc.s three-screen positioning. Dual-mode devices also are increasingly available.
Consumers and businesses alike will continue to demand innovative options, and competitors wishing to make a go of it in the next-generation business have to understand the bandwidth requirements, the business cases, the revenue shares, the partnerships and the differentiations that shape this field.
Presenter Payam Maveddat, vice president of product line management at Tekelec, for instance, will tackle the subject of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC).
Whats delaying deployment of FMC? he asks. FMC is viewed as the leading IMS application. However, in absence of an IMS infrastructure, many service providers are moving forward with innovative solutions to provide FMC for voice and messaging services. The leading carriers are primarily fixed-line carriers and MVNOs that must remain competitive in this highly mobile environment.
Many challenges and uncertainties must be resolved if IMS is to realize its full potential using FMC as a leading application, he notes, including the availability of cost-effective handsets, security architecture, service transparency, 3G radio penetration and the strategy of mobile carriers to offer VoIP over these infrastructures.
The session will help to answer these questions, explore the role of FMC in the IMS architecture and explain how FMC can leverage an IMS framework to deliver emerging revenue-generating applications.
Also presenting are Chris Reese, president and CEO at i3 Networks, and Colby Synesael, an equity research analyst at Merriman Curham Ford & Co.
The next session, 7 Ways to Reach Your Key Customers in 2007, will focus on new advertising and marketing strategies. Gone are the days of broadcast, one-size-fits-all telemarketing and direct mail! New advertising options allow you to leverage the tremendous amount of information available about customers, such as: which state they live in, whether they have bought before, what their communications portfolios contain today, and whether the account represents a family, business or a single person. The next step is leveraging the existing data, applying business intelligence to it, and creating a so-called market of one, with targeted messaging, offers, discounts and more. Marketing can be segmented by subscriber type, geography, even tailored according to the season. To close the loop, there are a variety of tools to track and analyze the success of a given campaign.
Optimizing marketing spending by leveraging new media and turbocharging old standbys can make the difference in a highly competitive market.
Presenters include Rich Koch, CEO of RNK Communications; Nitin Krishna, director of product marketing at INFONXX; and Justin McLain, executive vice president at Endeavor Telecom.
To wrap up the morning, the third track, 7 Ways for Carriers to Compete with ILECs in 2007, takes on the key question at the hearts of many attendees: How can the competitive industry cultivate business practices that will improve profitability in the years to come?
One way is by focusing on fiscal health. CustomCall Data Systems, for instance, will demonstrate its workflow-enabled billing and OSS solution, showing how service providers can integrate their people, processes, billing, provisioning, order management, Web site and back-office functions. The effect of this, said presenter Frank Peregrine, CustomCalls CEO, is allowing CLECs to better serve their customers, prevent revenue leakage, standardize business processes, eliminate duplicate data entry and grow their business.
Another way to compete is building a wireless or metro Ethernet access network. This is one business model that will become very important, said Reed Smith. You can cherry-pick the best and aggregate it to one CO or switch. As soon as you have a network that is unique and yours, that will become a strong way to compete with incumbents.
Presenters for this session also include Danny Bloudin, director of teleservices marketing at TELUS Communications; Tad Deriso, general manager at Mid Atlantic Broadband Cooperative; and Mike Friloux, COO at Citynets wholesale division.