In this video podcast, Marketing Voices’ Jennifer Jones, and others, talk with industry insiders to find out how combining social media with the art of storytelling in blogs, wikis and podcasts will foster conversations, convert incremental audience, and ultimately increase audiences’ engagement with brands. How can you use social media to create a voice for your brand that resonates beyond your corporate Web site? How can syndication help move your brand’s voice to your audiences, and bring those audiences back to your brand?

Tags: social media, syndication, rss, Marketing Voices, Jennifer Jones, PodTech, brand engagement, corporate messaging, conversation, blogosphere, blogs, engagement, community, marketing mix, incremental audience

In this video podcast, Marketing Voices’ Jennifer Jones, and others, talk with industry insiders to find out how combining social media with the art of storytelling in blogs, wikis and podcasts will foster conversations, convert incremental audience, and ultimately increase audiences’ engagement with brands. How can you use social media to create a voice for your brand that resonates beyond your corporate Web site? How can syndication help move your brand’s voice to your audiences, and bring those audiences back to your brand?

Tags: social media, syndication, rss, Marketing Voices, Jennifer Jones, PodTech, brand engagement, corporate messaging, conversation, blogosphere, blogs, engagement, community, marketing mix, incremental audience

Find out how combining social media with the art of storytelling in blogs, wikis and podcasts will foster conversations, convert incremental audience, and ultimately increase audiences’ engagement with brands. How can you use social media to create a voice for your brand that resonates beyond your corporate Web site? How can syndication help move your brand’s voice to your audiences, and bring those audiences back to your brand?

Tags: social media, syndication, rss, Marketing Voices, Jennifer Jones, PodTech, brand engagement, corporate messaging, conversation, blogosphere, blogs, engagement, community, marketing mix, incremental audience

Alcatel-Lucent is committed to helping operators deliver a superior user experience. One of the ways to help is to gain an intimate understanding of end-user behavior and the Bell Labs Human Factors team is one of the many groups within Alcatel-Lucent doing just that. The team is made up of Ph.D.s with an average of 15+ years professional usability experience working to:
(more…)

Tags: Nancy Bhagat, Jennifer Jones, Upload Lounge, Fall IDF, social media messaging, social media strategy, integrated marketing, engagement, marketing budget

Tags: Information Architecture, Web strategy, Boxes and Arrows

Transcript:
Host: Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Guest: Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Guest: Andy Randall - MetaSwitch

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
PodTech.net brings you a conversation with MetaSwitch’s Chris Mairs, he is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Business Development, and with Andy Randall, Vice President of Marketing. They’ll discuss the partnership between Cisco and MetaSwitch, the definition of service in Next Generation Networks and the challenges CLECs face in the 21st century IT climate.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
So, I’m Chris Mairs, I’m the MetaSwitch CTO and I’m also the Senior VP for Business Development.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Welcome to the Podcast.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Thank you.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I’m Andy Randall, VP of Marketing, MetaSwitch.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
So, thanks for being here. We’re here at the Marriott in Orlando, kind of a side event to COMPTEL. There was just a breakfast put on by MetaSwitch for some of your customers and business partners. I wanted to talk to you Chris, if you could start with your CTO hat on, to talk about some of the challenges CLECs are facing and kind of the technological challenges, how to develop a 21st century platform as an equipment vendor?

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
So, CLECs will always be in the position of needing to innovate and differentiate themselves from the incumbents. The incumbent has the huge advantage of owning the customer base, and the CLECs often moving into a — moving it in a competitive way to take customers away. So, what we need to do is be able to offer innovative services and different service bundles where the customer maybe says, well, the telephone service I get from my incumbent provider is all right, so I’m fine with that, but hey, if I can get that in a single pricing bundle with video as well under some unique data services, then I’m prepared to move in order to take the bundle. Similarly, the CLEC may be able to pick up on a new trend, a social trend, a classic example historically would have been something like text messaging, another one that’s reasonably hot at the moment is presence or custom ring-back, all these new services that come along.

The key is that the CLEC needs to be able to deliver that more quickly than the incumbent in order to be able to move in. So, they need an architecture where they can slot in new services quickly and those services may come from different vendors, so they’ve got services coming from multiple different vendors on different application server platforms. One of the keys here is an architecture such as IMS, and MetaSwitch has for the past two years already had some of the infrastructure in place, it allows those application service to be slotted in, which allows for quick delivery of new services. The key then is how do you blend all that in such a way that the experience for the user is seamless, they don’t need to see that all the different applications are coming from different vendors, and the billing infrastructure is correct, and the operational infrastructure is correct, so that CLEC can actually make money from that. There’s a lot of nuts and bolts in the architecture of the network, and specifically in the architecture of the switch to allow appropriate records to be flown out at the right time and then consolidate back together again, and all the subscriber information to be held in a single repository, which is called the HSS, the Home Subscriber Server, and from there all the different application servers can pull out data relating to a subscriber and offer a joint up solution.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Chris, I’ve question from that. The way you’re presenting, which appears right, is that the CLECs need to be more nimble, need to be faster than the incumbents, and we see IMS has an architecture to enable this, and that all make sense, but then when you look at the headlines, it’s the incumbents who are all making the noise about the move to IMS, and the ones that are embracing this architecture. Do you see a conflict there, what’s really happening in terms of who is adopting IMS and what people are doing with advance services?

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Okay, interesting question. So, if you look at the very big guys, the AT&Ts of this world, then what’s driving them to IMS is a need to replace a very, very, very complex and monolithic network infrastructure with a new architecture, and they’ve settled on IMS as being the right architecture. They are throwing literally billions of dollars at that sort of network replacement, and they need a strong architecture to do that with, and IMS is the best blueprint around to do that with.

For the smaller guys — and IMS may not want to take it in its absolutely purest form and take every single piece and decompose the network to the ultimate level. Nonetheless, it has some very clear differentiation of the network into the control plane transport and the application server planes, and buy that separation out into different plane, that smaller guys can leverage the IMS architecture to give them a better service delivery platform.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
You kind of discussed the definition of service for a Next Generation Networks in that last question, is there more to say about that?

Chris Mairs – MetaSwitch
You can’t just deliver plain old voice anymore, you’ve got to be able to deliver new services and you won’t know what those services are today, and certainly you won’t know what services people are prepared to pay for. A classic example would be ringtones on mobile phones. Today, many youngsters expect to be able to download a whole track of music for free, but equally they’ll pay $0.99 or $1.99 for a ringtone on their mobile phone, which is only a small clip of that same track, so how does that work? I don’t understand it, but people do that, and so as a service provider you don’t necessarily — you’re never going to be able to rationalize or prejudge what’s going to happen, but when a phenomenon does happen, you need to be able to make the most of it and make money from it.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think that points to one of the key things about service delivery is, it’s not just about being able to do these things, it’s about the granularity with which you can build for them as well, and yeah, some things are going to go to bundles, where people pay a monthly subscription fee, another area, it’s moving very much towards having a lot of small cheap transactions, that’s why iTunes does so well selling all these songs at $0.99 each. If a service provider can move into that model, where people in some sense get some kind of service for — a small fee at a time than that’s very much going with the direction that certainly the younger generation are expecting to be able to get access to it.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
So, a good example of that might be, as a residential user, the parents might setup a teen line service, where you have a separate facility on your home phone where if a call comes in for your teenager, it rings to a different — it’s a different number associated with the home phone, and you get a different ringtone for it, and that’s for your teenage kid. Now, what you might want to do is have a package bundle where the teenager gets $10 a month which they can spend either on calls or on text messages or on ringtones, and the single bundle there and the teenager makes the choice. The parent of course is safe, because they’ve partitioned the bundle to $10 a month, but the teenager gets to spend the money on what they want to spend it on.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
Most billing systems today wouldn’t be able to let you do that, most carriers can’t deliver that kind of service yet because the billing systems aren’t there and the backend infrastructure isn’t there, so I think that’s what we’re getting to.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
That’s right, so it’s not just the underline protocols which IMS is so heavy on, it’s some of the more sort of prosaic back office stuff like the billing systems which have to be changed to make them much more granular.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
As Senior VP of Business Development, you mange overall MetaSwitch’s partnership with Cisco Systems, can you tell me a little bit more about what MetaSwitch is doing with Cisco?

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Sure. So, our relationship with Cisco is primarily a sales partnership. So, both our sales forces are joined up and make joint calls on customers, where we can offer a combination of Cisco equipment, MetaSwitch equipment and possibly professional services from either organization to deliver a total solution. We also have close relationships with Cisco’s product management teams for their various equipment, their routers, their IAD’s, their phones, and through our combination of product management relationships and sales relationships, we can actually deliver effective solutions in the CLECs space, but also in the rural IOC space, and also in cable, we’ve just recently announced a relationship with Cisco in the cable space.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I can talk about that a bit maybe from the customer perspective. I think what we see when we do go out to customers and talk to them about Cisco relationships and do these joint calls with the Cisco team is that, they very much look to Cisco as the incumbent vendor, as the dominant vendor for Next Generation Networking infrastructure. So, lot of our customers, they’re not just making a decision about putting in a soft switch, they’re making a decision about changing their network completely, migrating their network to a Next Gen Core. So, those decisions are very tightly tied together in terms of how do we upgrade our network infrastructure and how do we deliver applications and services on top of that. So, the fact we have that partnership, really enables them to take a holistic view of what they’re trying to do and also obviously makes them feel good about MetaSwitch in that, we’re taking that view that we have to go beyond just the soft switch to make sure that their whole network implementation works. That’s a key driver behind the partnership with Cisco is, to make sure that we’re not just delivering a switching platform, but we work with the routers, with the switches, with the customer premise equipment, Cisco’s very dominant end, for example, IP phones, the world’s largest supplier of IP phones, so that we see very good feedback from the customers about how that relationship’s working.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Just adding a little bit to what Andy was saying about the technical challenges over Voice over IP network. We have a very distributed switch architecture, where we separate out the media gateway from the call agent and we have redundant call agents, and that’s all great, but if the underlying IP network doesn’t have the appropriate characteristics in terms of latency, jitter and redundant paths, and it’s very complex building a totally redundant IP network. If that infrastructure isn’t there, then whatever we do in a switch is worth nothing, so that’s why our relationship with Cisco is important for us.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Chris Mairs, CTO and SVP of Business Development for MetaSwitch.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Thank you.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Andy Randall, VP of Marketing for MetaSwitch, thanks so much. At the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, this is PodTech.net.

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Tags: MetaSwitch, Chris Mairs, Andy Randall, Cisco

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Transcript:
John: We had 911 and now four years later - let’s talk about national security and the global environment. What’s your view on national security shaping the technology agenda?

Sandy: the homeland security part and the protection against terrorists - technology will provide us many of our best defenses like sensor technology and biometric technology. Technology will come from entrepreneurs and the private sector. The federal government resource will advance the private entrepreneurship to provide the kind of technology to protect us. In terms of globalization issue the fact is that we live in a global economy and the distinction between domestic and foreign is not meaningful anymore. You can’t grow as a company very far unless you have an international strategy.

John: War on ideas. Is our national security and technology interdependent and is the war counterproductive?

Sandy: The communication revolution and the capacity for people to get messages quickly around the world and communicate with others no matter where they reside is transformation. It is going to be difficult for China to remain a authoritarian society. As its’ people get more advance economically 340m Chinese now have cell phones 7% of the population use the net and that grew by 18% last year. It’s very hard for government to control and surpress messages when people know what’s happening outside their borders. In China for example text messaging was used when the demonstration against Japan began in China about 2 months ago because Japan wasn’t acknowledging their role in World War II – very emotional issue for the Chinese. They got huge crowds out by text messaging to large groups of people. The Chinese government for a week or two was happy to see those demonstrations because it wanted to take a shot across the bow of Japan. The Chinese then got nervous that the same technology could be used to have mass demonstrations against their own government and so they shut it down.

John: It’s hard to control we’re living in a “social grid” with instant communications and some will say the US is falling behind and this may play into national security policy and homeland security.

Sandy: We have to be at the cutting edge. In this day and age our comparative advantage is not manufacturing, it’s no longer services, and it’s no longer technology by itself. Our comparative advantage is our innovation. It’s our ability to design and develop the next big wave. Our entrepreneurs are thinking outside the box and are at conferences like Always On.

John: Big prediction 5 years out relative to world economy

Sandy: The world economy will be far more interlaced than it is today and that will be a good thing. It is very hard to go to war with a country who’s economy you depend on and vice versa. The more we engage with others both on a personal level, a corporate level, and business level the safer and peaceful the world will be.

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