Richard Handford, Contributing Writer

Any delegate who ingeniously managed to attend all five Summit sessions running concurrently at Management World 2009 this week would gain an instant overview of the key challenges facing the communications industry: the pressure to undergo business transformation; the lure of new media revenues; the constant drive to maintain customer loyalty; the arrival of more industry standards and new technologies; and, possibly most importantly in current times, the latest revenue assurance strategies.

Looking first at the Business Transformation Summit, delegates will hear about the continual growth of competition and the constant need to respond through operational efficiency and innovation. The wider economic situation will give an added impetus to the discussions.

Among the summit’s keynote speakers will be Mehrdad Mansourpour, managing director and CIO of European cable giant UPC Broadband, and Rod Snodgrass, group strategy director, Telecom New Zealand, the country’s incumbent telecom operator.

“This is a key subject for us in the cable industry, but the downturn in the economy also brings a new flavor, which is why it’s so important to look at business transformation,” Mansourpour says. Customers are increasingly demanding and individual in their tastes, while operators are under pressure to increase cashflow and bring services to market faster, he adds.

Certainly, the safety of the traditional value chain in the telecom industry has started to disappear.  Telecom, cable and mobile operators are now working more and more with advertising, media and entertainment companies, an area that will be discussed in the Digital Media Value Chain Summit. Among the summit’s keynote speakers are David Craig, the chief strategy officer of media giant Thomson Reuters, and Rupert Day, chief operating officer of GroupM, a leading media buying agency that also represents operators and vendors as clients.

Day says he will be introducing GroupM and its role in the media ecosystem to operators. He’s also keen to try to understand what the business model is for IPTV (he is unconvinced it has one). Day also wants to gauge how serious mobile operators are about mobile advertising. “My personal view is that up to this point they have looked at it as a possible future source of income but not as a strategic pillar.” He wants to find out in Nice if his view is right, and if so whether the industry is about to change.

A higher up-take of mobile advertising would put more emphasis on personalizing services. And keeping users loyal, which is where the Customer Experience Summit comes in. It will look at how customer data can be utilized in creative, as well as responsible, ways, and how that achievement can feed through into greater customer loyalty and lower churn: the goal that all operators are pursuing alongside revenue growth.

Of course operators need to have a complete picture of their networks and systems to satisfy user needs. How to get that view is a key topic this week says Erwan Ménard, vice president & general manager, HP Communications & Media Solutions Business, who is participating in the summit. “We are going to correlate the network view of customer experience, which is a very telecom-centric view of the world, with the applications view of end-user experience, which actually the IT world understands better.” 

Keynote speakers during the week include Sumit Chowdhury, CIO of Reliance Communications, one of India’s leading mobile operators, and Rik Roncken, head of UK carrier BT’s new Onevoice service.

None of the operator’s ambitions are possible of course unless they get the underlying technology right. The Technology Transformation Summit offers practical advice from existing implementations and hard-won past experience, including that of Hossein Eslambolchi’s turnaround of AT&T’s networks and systems in the early 2000s. “Before I started my transformation, AT&T was pretty much a circuit-switched company. Tens of billions of dollars of revenue came from that business and 50-60 percent of EBIT margin.”

Now chairman & CEO of 2020 Venture Partners, an advisory firm for private equity, Eslambolchi will explain how he convinced AT&T about the migration to IP technology, among other achievements. Other keynote speakers during the summit include Jurgen Hardt, VP Technology& Platform Strategies, Deutsche Telekom.

Even more basic than the underlying network is billing a customer, and ensuring payment is handled smoothly and efficiently. The Charging & Revenue Management Summit will look at how the latest strategies can minimize loss and fraud, as well as boost profitability. Keynote speakers include Sabri Ali Yahya, CIO of Saudi operator Etisalat, and Margaret Morosi, Deutsche Telekom’s head of global services.

Innovation has grown in the billing market around new charging models for converged services, says Larry Goldman, practice leader for global telecom software with research firm Analysys Mason.

Goldman is chairing a session during the summit and wonders whether the economic slowdown will shift this week’s discussion to the earthier subjects of revenue assurance and fraud, what he terms “the ugly, difficult part” of telecom billing.  It feels like he might not be the only one thinking along these lines this week.