Pipeline's Red-Carpet Night: 2013 Innovation Awards

[Attendees of the 2013 COMET Awards enjoyed networking with industry analysts, service provider executives, and members of the press]

Competition was particularly fierce this year. Pipeline received more than 130 nominations from 75 companies, and the high quality of each nomination made the task of selecting finalists particularly difficult. Fortunately, we once again assembled a crack team of external judges comprised of industry experts who could draw on their wealth of collective experience to evaluate the nominations fairly and thoroughly.

This year’s judging panel included:

• Jason Cook, CTO of BT Americas
• David Lindsay III, chief architect, BT Global Services
• Juggy Sihota, vice president of client experience strategy and development at Telus
• Carol Borghesi, founder and principal of Customers First Culture and former senior vice president at Telus
• Debra Osswald, research vice president of CSP operations at IDC
• Mark Mortensen, principal analyst at Analysys Mason
• Shira Levine Enstrom, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence at Infonetics Research
• Craig Clausen, executive vice president and principal analyst at New Paradigm Resources Group
• Nancee Ruzicka, president of ICT Intuition
• Jeffrey Mitchell, executive architect of OSS at Tech Mahindra and former senior principal engineer of OSS for Intelsat, Sprint and others

A formidable collection of analysts and service providers, this judging panel combed through extensive nomination forms and supporting documentation to determine the top vendor solutions in a number of key areas. Some submissions were over 50 pages in length and leveraged many megabytes of multimedia information to support the submission. Once their submission packages were assembled and submitted to the esteemed judges panel, the names of our winners emerged; some award recipients were chosen nearly unanimously, while others were determined by a single vote. But regardless of the voting margins, the competition was tremendous, and the judges faced tough decisions from beginning to end.

“This second year for me was even more impressive in terms of nominations,” said Carol Borghesi, one of several judges who also served on Pipeline’s 2012 panel. “I was particularly struck by the focus on customer experience that ran as a golden thread throughout all of the submissions.”

Over the course of a top-notch evening featuring a jazz quartet and multiple courses of cuisine that, with apologies, reminded us we most certainly weren’t in Dublin anymore, our winners and runners-up made their way to the center of the rotunda to be presented with their Innovation Awards by Pipeline publisher Paula Zimmerman.