It has been too long without a blog entry, I know, but my excuse is that too much was happening (and I am sticking to it!).  Maybe you will find this more believable if you just read on.

First off, the predicted trip to Barcelona – Nola Balas of T-Mobile Netherlands accompanied me to the speaker's podium at the pre-show Business Operations Symposium to talk about the work recently concluded by our team in Lisbon, and more specifically the fixed and mobile operator requirements for device management she experiences in the daily operations of a major national network with many devices of different access types.  One tier 1 telco CTO commented on assuming his chair in a panel session that followed, "I liked the part about 'Zero-Touch Deployment!!'.  We later heard rumors that John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco (who is the company that will lead the catalyst in our program that bears this name) presented something similar but on a grander scale, in a decidedly bigger room than ours, introducing his "Chief Demonstration Officer" to show it (to sympathetic groans from the crowd).

Abraham Joseph, who leads the marketing efforts of our collaboration team and is also the Founder and CEO of the Device Management Forum, www.devicemanagement.org, had a booth at MWC and helped us meet several device manufacturers and interact on their requirements for the TM Forum program.

Our "next big thing" (apart from our usual and much larger event in Nice, Management World 2008 in May) will be a Device Management Summit that we have announced and that is now open for registration – it will take place June 24 in Santa Clara, California and is in collaboration with one of our "pillar" organizations, the Consumer Electronics Association, and organized by Parks Associates.  Check out the announcement on the www.tmforum.org homepage.