By Bernard Breton, SVP, Americas & APAC and Chief Marketing Officer, Infovista
Yesterday was the second and final day of the Infovista User Conference, which was held at the Marriott Chateau Champlain in Montreal. The first day, which featured a number of interesting presentations, closed with a thrilling circus performance and traditional French dinner in a Moulin Rouge-themed theater.
Thursday's program included two tracks of presentations throughout the afternoon about how the next wave of wireless network planning and optimization solutions can help mobile operators manage growing data demand and realize the benefits of their wireless access network strategies. A third track focused on how fixed-line operators can improve their margins, both by differentiating their business services and streamlining network CAPEX with Carrier Ethernet 2.0 and by launching application visibility services. These three tracks showcased Infovista's capabilities as well as how our products are being deployed by customers and partners around the world like Vodafone Australia, Econet Wireless in Zimbabwe, Entel in Chile, Kyocera Communication Systems in Japan, Teleworld and Samsung Network Services in North America.
One particularly interesting presenter was Prakash Rao of Optus Business, a division of Singtel, who flew in all the way from Australia for the event. Prakash described the case and considerations for value-added VPNs and why “it's not enough to just be connected anymore.” Rather, he recommends that communications service providers offer value-added services with flexible, end-to-end reporting options, so that they can improve their businesses and solve problems efficiently and proactively. He was quick to clarify that identifying the problem is not enough because simply knowing there is a problem will never solve it. Instead, he asks, what is the solution to my problem?
We also heard from Andre Sequerah, the founder of Aexio, which Infovista acquired yesterday, and now director of product management at Infovista. Andre described operators' shift in focus from the network to the customer in order to deliver a high quality of experience. To that end, he argues that operators need a cohesive, coherent view of their networks in order to effectively plan and optimize network performance and support customer experience management, namely customer acquisition and retention. Over the next several months, we'll be sharing more information about Aexio's products, Xeus and Xeda, and how they will work with Infovista's suite.
For those that weren't able to attend the Infovista User Conference this week, we'll be posting more pictures and video footage on our blog and social media channels. You can also contact your sales representative to get access to the presentations from the past two days. We thank our customers, partners and employees for attending this year, and look forward to an even more successful Infovista User Conference in 2014!
