Building a Smarter Planet. A Smarter Planet Blog.

by Scott Stainken, General Manager of IBM’s Global Communications Industry

Next week my colleagues and I travel to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012.  While there, we’ll be answering what we think are some of the most important questions being asked by smarter communications providers today.  Questions like…

…How can I increase campaign response rates? 

…How can I increase customer retention?

…How can I reduce time-to-market with cloud services? 

…How can I participate in the healthcare industry opportunity?

We’ll answer these questions with real-life customer stories that demonstrate how service providers are:

• Delivering smarter services to generate new sources of revenue faster.
• Transforming operations to achieve business and service excellence.
• Building smarter networks to optimize current and next-generation networks.

These are the imperatives we see emerging from our clients, and IBM believes the answers lie in three key enablers:

Advanced Analytics

Delivering smarter services requires pulling the vast amounts of consumer data available into a meaningful view of the customer.  By applying advanced analytics, a communications provider can create this view and map personalized service offers tailored to each subscriber by need.  Our clients are applying analytics with considerable success; we’ll be sharing many of their stories at MWC.

Cloud Technology

A next generation platform like cloud speeds design and deployment of smarter services.  Cloud makes it easier for communications companies to quickly expand their services offerings into new, rapidly growing verticals like healthcare, banking and government.  IBM has a complete portfolio of cloud solutions based on our clients’ deployment preference for private, public or hybrid cloud., and since launching in 2010, we’ve gained momentum helping service providers create, manage and monetize cloud-based services.

Security

The data explosion for mobile users will challenge the reliability of virtually all networks, and only after an organization has mitigated the risk to people, data, endpoints and infrastructure can it focus on empowering mobile employees.  With full mobile security, organizations are more agile and responsive, can generate new revenue, and facilitate the delivery and monetization of security threats.

On behalf of my fellow IBMers, we’re looking forward to seeing you in Barcelonanext week.  We’ll be exploring the answers to your questions in a private two-story courtyard pavilion.  This new home gives us a great venue for more intimate and focused conversations away from the distractions of the floor.  I hope you’ll come see us in the IBM Pavilion at 3.0 Courtyard CY23 armed with YOUR questions.

For more information on IBM’s participation at the even, visit our speakers and demonstrations.

Technorati Tags: communications, csp, GSMA, mobile, mwc, networks, scott-stainken, smarter-networks, smarter-telecom, smarter-telecommunications, stainken, telecom, telecommunications