Tara Seals Blog: Snow, Palm Trees and Personalization

Ah, 25 inches of snow. Power outages. That eerie silence that comes over the world when a deep, heavy snow settles in to stay a while. It’s Robert Frost, watching the woods, lovely dark and deep, fill up with the white stuff. It’s James Joyce’s last line in the Dubliners: “Snow was general all over Ireland." Of course, he was talking about more than the weather.

Joyce may have been making a cultural statement, but being a lesser mortal, I’m referring to the January snowstorm, which walloped the Northeast this week and has led to me writing the previous paragraph, that kaleidoscopic jumble of snow-related things. As I sit here with coffee and a blanket – well, actually two – furiously typing away as the sickly gray thin winter light struggles to illuminate the room, the rest of the B/OSS Live! Team is soaking up the sunshine in Phoenix, Ariz. Looking at palm trees. Having discussions about service assurance. Taking desert Hummer tours. Eating tacos (and honestly, that might be what hurts the most).

It’s our B/OSS Live! Advisory Board meeting, which I’m missing thanks to the cruelty of the Travel Fates. The team is getting together this week at Virgo World Headquarters on Central Avenue in Phoenix to review our developing agenda for the show in June and to trade ideas about where this industry is going and how we can better serve our audience with news, information, opinion, a world-class event and year-round community and thought leadership.

We’re pretty proud of our advisory board, which is a diverse collection of experts from a wide range of service providers as well as analyst firms. And so it was that I was conferencing into our roundtable discussions yesterday, as I was shivering on the sofa yesterday (did I mention we had a cold snap too? 4 degrees this morning. Get excited). It was worth the cauliflower-ear effect that comes with being on the phone for a three-hour stretch to hear from people actually on the ground in billing and OSS teams within these operators discuss what actually matters to them – what challenges they look to solve, what areas are hot. There was a lot of passion in the room. B/SS issues floated somewhat to the top, as did smart integrated policy. And we also had a fascinating roundtable on the phenomenon of personalization and how fulfilling this demand from end-users for tailored service bundles is driving big back-office changes – and changes that are rather sweeping in scope. The conversation was a goldmine of ideas and insights – operators as varied as Time Warner Cable, Qwest, Sprint, Vonage and Verizon, and analysts from Yankee Group, Analysys Mason and more, all weighed in fairly and frankly about what this industry macro-trend means to enablement and software teams.

The good news is this – I say as I edge my lame little space heater a little closer – we B/OSS Live! insiders aren’t the only ones who will benefit from that discussion. We videotaped the proceedings and are packaging up the personalization roundtable into an exclusive Webcast that will appear on the website as soon as we get the post-production done. So stay tuned for this exclusive bit of industry intelligence … I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

With that, I think it’s time to throw on some extra layers (did I mention that it’s 4 degrees here? And that there are no tacos to be found?) and return to the task of reporting on B/OSS happenings. Stay warm, dear readers.