By Christopher Cullan, Product Marketing Manager, Business Services Solutions, Infovista
This week was a whirlwind at Management World 2013, with more than 3,000 attendees squeezed into Nice's Acropolis. The show floor was packed with vendors, communications service providers (CSPs) and industry press and analysts, all buzzing with the excitement of free Microsoft Surface tablets and surprising industry announcements.
We particularly enjoy attending this event each year because it brings such a wide breadth of companies and people together. Here are a few stats that I found particularly interesting about Management World 2013 attendees:
- 334 CXOs were present, up 100 percent from last year.
- 220 CSPs from 81 different countries made up 40 percent of the show's attendees.
- North America and Europe, unsurprisingly, accounted for the majority of this year's attendees, but a growing percentage (8 percent) traveled from emerging regions.
This week was also particularly exciting for Infovista for a few other reasons. First, Mentum Planet, our wireless network planning and optimization software solution, won a Pipeline Innovation Award. And, coinciding with the start of the Management World conference, we launched our Application Visibility Services (AVS) offering with pre-built integration for Cisco Application Visibility & Control (AVC). This is a particularly important collaboration for us at Infovista, as we see so many CSPs looking for practical methods to create new revenue streams and drive additional value for their enterprise customers.
Here's a great example of the value AVS offers, which I shared with some industry peers this week: one CSP repeatedly heard from its customers that the network was down, but actually, based on the AVS capabilities that we're providing, the CSP was able to demonstrate to the customer that it wasn't its network–it was a consumer-based application brought in on employees' smart devices that had consumed the entire office's bandwidth, preventing any other traffic from getting through!
Not only does AVS improve the overall performance of the network by helping to eliminate these kinds of issues, but it also changes the tone of the conversation from one of frustration to one of positive problem-solving. This is invaluable for our CSP customers today, as they vie to deliver the best quality of service and quality of experience possible.
Check back next week for more takeaways from Management World 2013, including video interviews with myself and Bernard Breton. For all you attendees, safe travels!
