Oracle’s Customer Insights From OpenWorld

By Dan Ford, Vice President of Product Marketing, Oracle

Last month, we were pleased to host more than 1,200 customers from the communications and media industry – among more than 40,000 total attendees – at Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. It was an exciting event and a time to not only discuss Oracle’s product development and vision for the industry but, more importantly, to hear from all of you about the challenges you are facing and how you are overcoming them.

We heard from service providers around the world looking for innovative ways to grow their top line while making more efficient use of capital and operating expenditures – all the while battling growing competition among traditional and “next generation” providers. Some providers shared their strategies for growing market share and revenue by quickly deploying new services or opening up their networks to third party developers. Others shared how they have been able to unify and consolidate billing, CRM or network systems to reduce costs and improve customer service.

But enough from me. Why should I go on and on when you can hear it from them directly? At the show, we were able to sit down with several leading service providers to discuss these very topics. Let me share a couple of the conversations I found most interesting.

Graham Evans, head of design and architecture for data delivery, Telefonica O2 UK, discusses the importance of monetizing third-party content and how to overcome the related security challenges:

Evangelos Adam from OTE discusses how his company is addressing IP service competition in Greece:

Check out other videos at http://www.youtube.com/oraclecommunications.

What about you? What challenges are you facing? What are your top IT priorities for 2010? I welcome your thoughts.