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Management World is such a cool event. A trade show in Dallas or London wouldn't have quite the same wide array of interesting possibilities for networking and relaxation.

Expo Meetings:

Management World certainly isn't all champagne and moonlight. We spent a great deal of our time in Nice in meetings with individual companies. Here are a few of the companies we met with (and just a small sampling, at that. Due to the number of companies with whom we met and the high quality of the meetings across the board, we couldn't fit them all into this issue.)

Sigma Systems:

Sigma is doing some really interesting things in a couple of areas that are of rising importance in the communications space. First of all, they're doing some great things in the cable space to increase the viability of commercial VoIP. That's key, because it enables cablecos to chip away at the enterprise market, which telcos have a lock on, even as the telcos' residential customers realize that the time may be right to jump ship for a cable triple- or quad-play bundle. Sigma is also looking into streams of alternate monetization. Amid the clamor among SPs to not become mere bitpipes, Sigma is looking into support for advanced advertising, subscriber information services written for anonymized data, and other ways to leverage core competencies and valuable data in order to make the possible transition to bitpipe as smooth and profitable as possible.

Tribold:

Tribold continues to trumpet the value of its product catalog solutions. The company has gotten a good deal of market recognition and continues to be active on its own and through partners (like Patni, IBM). The goal of Tribold's solution, and any OSS solution, really, is to, as Tribold COO Simon Muderack puts it,

expanded into a two story meeting facility with meeting rooms, lounges, etc.) It got our attention. They brought multiple press releases to the show. One was a release regarding their involvement in the show. Another was on their partnership with IBM to offer a standards-based fulfillment solution. They also had releases on their partnership with Cisco and the release of Amdocs CES- Cramer OSS 7.5. That last press release was interesting because the new Amdocs rollout includes “bundled operational process packs” that allow providers to mix and match services based on need, while speeding up deployment.

Openet:

Openet is doing a lot of stuff that makes sense in the current communications market. Using their FusionWorks engine, Openet is active in the mediation, charging, and rating space, and beyond. Their balance management and policy management solutions have a great deal of possibility in the space enabling parents or bosses to set limitations on calling plans. In addition, Openet continues to offer lawful intercept solutions that are alarmingly relevant in today's world. The key word for Openet is visibility. The ability to see what's going on in the network