By: Wedge Greene
“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” — Milan Kundera“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.” ― Peter F. Drucker Here we have a quandary at
the heart of competitive progress. Two different people are attributed to the same quote. It’s reveling in how this quote is both right and, in its simplicity, profoundly wrong. This simplified
wrongness accentuates the core of its truth. To do business you must both innovate and market. More often than not the quote is attributed to Peter Drucker; this is a testament to his prowess at
marketing his ideas…
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By: Dr. Andy Tiller
Today’s operators have spent decades building their networks and upgrading their IT systems to support more and more users looking for an increasing number of data-driven applications. At the
heart of these systems is the BSS, the IT infrastructure managing the business processes that support the customer-facing applications. These include billing, CRM and customer analytics – all the
touchpoints that can drive differentiation and have a direct impact on an operator’s brand value. So it’s understandable that operators perceive a high risk in transforming their BSS systems…
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By: Michael Mills
The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are fast approaching and athletes are not the only ones preparing. With spectator ticket sales expected to hit 7.5 million, on top of over
10,500 athletes in attendance, planning for every aspect of the Olympics is a heavy lift for organizations and companies worldwide. Consumer-focused industries, in particular, are anticipating
added pressures leading up to and during the games as they prepare for an influx of customer inquiries. As a high-touch support system, call center support teams can face increased stress during
big events such as the Olympics due to high call volumes…
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By: Stephane Bourque
In the modern age of broadband services, providing a consistent and exceptional quality of experience (QoE) to every subscriber on your network is vital for retaining customers and keeping
profits up. Subscribers, especially from the millennial generation, want access to on-demand HD video and music, 4K IPTV, and a wide variety of ever-changing over-the-top (OTT) content and
applications, which in many cases must be delivered to multiple screens within the home network. On top of this, all of these services must be delivered at optimal quality without
interruption…
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By: Tim Young
As the communications landscape continues to change and digital transformation creates strange new bedfellows, upends traditional processes and infrastructures, and threatens to render even the
most entrenched vendor/CSP relationship obsolete, providers of the business and operations support systems that have been the lifeblood of the industry for decades are left with a new challenge.
They must find ways to move forward and find new customers. One way to do so is to break out of their traditional communications, media and entertainment footprint and instead offer their services
and wares in new industry verticals…
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By: Havish Timmaraju
As a society, we collect an awful lot of data: about people, about processes, about things. The volume, variety and velocity of Big Data is growing exponentially, and over the next 10 years,
global traffic is predicted to reach over 100 trillion gigabytes. Research firm IDC argues that the world's information now doubles about every year and a half. It’s the intelligence of our systems
that’s precipitating this rapid growth—the volume of structured and unstructured data being collected isn’t necessarily valuable on its own; but what companies can now do with this data is becoming
incredibly important…
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By: William T. Cannon
Over the last 10 years, service providers have been striving to roll out the next generation of services that include voice, video, WiFi, wireless -- and all the bandwidth customers can
possibly digest. To accomplish this, providers need a more agile infrastructure to provision complex service offerings, across multiple platforms, hungry set-top boxes, smartphones and an army of
tablets. However, over time the service assurance base has atrophied. If you open the hood on any operation center, you'll see network management tools that have been installed for 15-plus
years…
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By: Wedge Greene
Episode 6 of Pipeline’s ongoing serial, IoT Noir, starts some 15 years from now immediately following the emergency treatment of Ninan Pakinar in an automated clinic run by the AI Nightingale.
If our readers recall, Kiko-Lyn Greg was rescued in a raid by the mercenary cyborg Ninan on the Hong Kong lab of Jonathon Blake, the CEO of International Widget. Jonathon had started this chain of
events when he waged a cyber-attack on the IoT water control company of Kiko-Lyn’s aunt, Rachael Greg. During this attack, Black Hat hackers sabotaged Rachael’s smart home and attempted to kill
her…
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By: Tim Young
"The new pushes the old out of the way and retains what it wants to." - Prince, in a 2011 interview with The Guardian. The Artist, The Purple One, His Royal Badness, Prince Rogers Nelson was,
of course, right about this. He was many things, Prince, and he was unafraid to be all of those things or none of them, and was fully uninterested in what anyone else thought of his dynamic
sensibility. He shared that sense with several of my other favorite musicians, including another ethereal being who was taken far too soon: Bowie…
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By: Jim Schakenbach
April was a dynamic month for all things telecommunications, including FCC activity, IoT monetization, carrier asset sales, and growing interest in carrier content acquisition and distribution.
Also, it turns out millennials are having a significant impact on mobile. The FCC is on a mission to modernize The FCC remained busy this month as it took up a number of issues in its ongoing
effort to help modernize telecommunications infrastructure and service for all Americans. The commission started by moving to expand rural broadband deployment through modernizing and
reforming small carrier universal service support…
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