Increasing profitability and customer loyalty resides in the ability to offer personalized and compelling services to meet the specific needs of each customer segment. Effective product development starts with analyzing customer data and understanding customer behavior to identify opportunities for increasing revenues and customer satisfaction. This presentation will examine how Analytics and Real-time Convergent Billing can be used to develop innovative and appealing service offerings to address the competition and boost the overall customer experience.

With the world recovering from recession, what is the outlook for the fast changing communications industry particularly in the Middle East. How will global and regional trends affect each other and what are the key strategies that the TM Forum will be pursuing to support its members in these challenging yet exciting times.

Across the region, mobile phone penetration has exceeded fixed line penetration. On the back of the successful growth of mobile voice is a second growth wave – mobile broadband. With speeds comparable or even better than current fixed ADSL, the current 3G mobile broadband offers are becoming the center of gravity for the majority of users with the PC supplementing this experience. The adoption rate of Facebook and other social medias in the Middle East shows that demand is not the bottleneck for growth. The irreversible increase of smartphones and Laptops/Netbooks fuels this trend even further. Bottlenecks remain in international infrastructure and Arabic content and applications to enhance consumers lives. Vodafone Group, and Vodafone Egypt specifically, have made this trend a key corner stone of our strategy and leads the market in mobile Broadband. Because of our leading position we are well aware that this rapidly growing demand cannot be fulfilled by one player alone but requires strong and long-term partnerships, an open developers platform to leverage individual developers’ creativity and skills, an open innovation mindset – away from walled gardens and a sustainable business model to create win-win for customers and partners.

With slashed backhaul budgets, continued flat-rate subscriber growth and surging broadband and mobile applications usage, providers and customers are struggling with more service outages, a lower quality of experience, and shrinking profit margins. Many are implementing usage-based business models enabled by policy control and traffic shaping systems, guaranteeing consistent QoS and creating new revenues. This presentation will exhibit multiple case study results exploring these systems’ effectiveness, and users’ acceptance of next-generation telecom business models.

Customers are demanding. They want more services and seamless quality performance. Responding to this challenge – against a backdrop of an economic slowdown – places increasing demands on network operators to deliver consistently high levels of service like never before. Operators in these new emerging markets have to perform a delicate balancing act between rapid rollout to meet rising demand and the generally low levels of ARPU achievable.

As carriers evolve in Revenue Management maturity, changes in the overall customer experience will also occur as a result of this progress. These changes are not always positive and may result increased churn if not managed properly. This presentation will align customer experience against the different phases of maturity and discuss pitfalls and strategies to avoid losing your most important asset: your subscribers.

This presentation will give an overview of the submarine and terrestrial cable systems in the Middle East and examine the impact of the new cable system on wholesale capacity pricing, retail pricing and ARPU in the region. The presentation will also cover the capacity drivers for bandwidth in the region and the importance of OSS/BSS, how they can drive profitability and allow Du to take advantage of wholesale market opportunities.

Mobile internet has undeniably turned the corner as access to high-speed networks fuels substantial growth. Traffic levels driven by P2P and Internet Access are expected to grow 20 times in southern Africa in the next 3 to 5 years, dramatically outpacing the predicted data revenue increase. Demand for mobile broadband is here, but is there a sustainable business case? This presentation will examine traffic management, cost efficiencies and the applications and services required for the business and network transformation needed to enable profitable broadband services.

Slingbox’s success has once again demonstrated that subscribers put personalized content above all else when it comes to using a service. This presentation is about how service providers can use the power of personalization and enable delivery of services- fixed or mobile, regardless of location. Using cases studies from Swisscom, US Government, it describes how device-activated and nomadic services used so effectively by Slingbox can enable the highest personalization and drive significant new revenues.

This panel session will examine how you can monetize content, differentiate your offering, expand your business internationally and achieve sustainable growth. Listen to telecom experts discuss new business models for profitability and long-term business success; these include: • Inflating subscription rates, increasing customer uptake and generating higher revenues • Encouraging value added service creation for enhanced revenue generation, while reducing time-to-market • Defining the key requirements for advance content delivery and increasing ARPU

Revenue Assurance at operators around the world is in various stages of maturity. However, all RA departments need to continue to prove their value to the business. This discussion will take the paths of both a non-operator view of current trends and then move to the views of a local operator as they progress through their RA Maturity cycle. The discussion will give participants food for thought in terms of the responsibilities of the RA department of the future and how this may or may not affect today and further down the road.

The TM Forum Interface Program (TIP) is standardizing the next generation of OSS interfaces by drawing upon the strengths of MTOSI, OSS/J, MTNM and IPDR. The TIP Framework will encompass the core tools, software components, and documentation to enable the rapid specification of each new interface from business requirements through to WSDL in accordance with the TIP design guidelines. One of the most innovative aspects of the program is in its use of Open Source development techniques and technologies to increase the attractiveness of the new interfaces for early adopters. Open source is being used to create the core TIP Framework artifacts, reference implementations, compatibility test kits and an implementation library for prospective developers. This talk will provide an introduction to the TIP Open Source project and infrastructure as hosted on http://openoss.sourceforge.net.

Today’s main challenge for a Service Provider's IT Department is to transform in order to enable converged services delivery, but what are the business benefits of this transformation and what are the key technical challenges?

Service providers need to avoid being just a Network Operator or a bit pipe provider to build a sustainable business model in the era of Web2.0 and of explosion of data traffic. Operation transformation it is not only Networks needing the innovation but Shifting from Network focus to Customer Centric. We will discuss the CSPs challenges and opportunities to deal with the wealth of data in their possession and how standards can evolve to support the process of collecting, managing, presenting and processing the “Network & Customer” information.

HCL partnered with British Telecom in designing an innovative Telecom Operations Support Framework with the focus on the accuracy and timeliness of service delivered utilising the TM Forum Applications Framework (TAM) and Service Delivery Framework (SDF). The presentation illustrates the salient features of this model and the strategic initiatives which have produced tangible values such as 50% reduction in the number of incidents, 45% reduction in cycle time and sizable improvements in many other metrics.

This presentation takes a holistic approach towards the telecom enterprise, and focuses on the role a common data infrastructure plays in the enterprise operations from corporate investment decisions to day-to-day operations. This presentation discusses how to create a solid data infrastructure based on the 5C’s (Consistency, Completeness, Cleanliness, Common availability and Control). This common data infrastructure will form the foundations for efficient and flexible enterprise operations architecture that will provide the operator the much needed sustainable competitive advantage by significantly reducing cost of operations while increasing the quality of information through the enterprise and streamlining processes. The presentation will provide real-life examples of service providers that have adopted this common information infrastructure and focus on efficiencies they have achieved.