Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	Time for a Check Up

Pipeline’s look at GLOBALCOMM 2006

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The event also had its fair share of launches and relaunches. S2Net, which was formerly known at Open Telecommunications, is in the middle of some serious rebranding, and had a presence at the show as a part of the Telemanagement Forum’s Pavilion (which also featured Nakina, Syndesis, and DigitalFuel). Paul Sethy, the brains behind AirPrime, was also at the show promoting his new firm, Aviva, which is currently in its ‘Soft Launch’ phase.

The event also served as an opportunity for a few firms to simply let the rest of the telecom world know that they are alive and kicking. Such is true for VeriSign, which, in spite of its size (over 4000 employees), is plagued by misconceptions concerning corporate identity. “From a communications standpoint, one of the challenges that we have is that people say ‘Oh VeriSign. You’re the dot com company’ or ‘you’re the security company’,” says Lori Sinsley, of VeriSign’s Media Relations department. “The San Jose Mercury News did a story once on a VoIP partnership we had as ‘VeriSign gets into the telecommunications business’, but we had been in it for years.” Shows like GLOBALCOMM can ostensibly be opportunities to rectify those misconceptions, though a show that spans all elements of the telecom industry may not be the most advantageous venue for declaring specifics about the spaces in which you are active.

Still, with hundreds of exhibitors, there were plenty of stories to tell. Narus was at the show promoting their traffic processing solutions, which provide security, lawful intercept (a topic that flew under the radar in many meetings, but is certainly timely), and traffic classification. Security is always a hot topic, especially in the age of distributed denial of service attacks. The concept of monitoring and classifying types of traffic was hot with other firms as well, including Allot. In fact, as the number and types of IP services offered continues to increase, traffic classification is the key to managing and billing for service providers.

And, no trip to a major telecom event is complete without a spate of press releases. Syndesis announced their converged

workflow and order management solution, dubbed Syndesis Controller, which they developed in a partnership with ConceptWave. The two firms held joint meetings at the show touting the promise of their unified product. Other announcements included S2Net’s BusinessEdge partnership and various new product announcements from hardware companies.

However, in spite of all of its positive elements, GLOBALCOMM 2006 was not without its negative points. Chief among these, as was the case with USTA’s TelecomNext, was attendance. The event was by no means sparsely attended, but some vendors expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of foot traffic at the event. Ultimately, many vendors wondered whether the industry can afford the added cost of both TelecomNEXT and GLOBALCOMM. Many of these same vendors have decided to take on the cost to travel to both events this year, but have no intention of maintaining such a pattern of spending. They’ll double up now, but are extremely keen on picking an event as soon as possible.

However, in spite of decreased traffic, the show still showed undeniable promise and provided a venue for the meeting of minds. Pipeline looks forward to the future of this event, and we are eager to see what is in store for GLOBALCOMM 2007!

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