The Power of Innovation

Here's a closer look at some of they key submissions that illustrate the breadth of this year's competition and depth of technical innovation:

In the category for Innovations in Security & Assurance, it was evident that securing data and telecom operations is a paramount concern facing the industry today. Both Nakina Systems and Accurate Always submitted examples of the new, sophisticated technology designed to address this. Nakina Systems was nominated for their new Secure Network Auditing Platform, and Accurate Always was nominated for its new Voxida CenterSecure technology. Both products are designed to protect critical data within telecommunications and large enterprise environments. Voxida looks at protecting the specific data that is the target of most data breaches and provides preventative and investigative analytics to stop breaches from occurring. Nakina's platform is a broad-based security solution that provides rich analysis multiple levels of heterogeneous network activity - both malicious and inadvertent - to identify security vulnerabilities. Both solutions are at the forefront of the security issue and the judges will have their work cut out for them in selecting a winner.

One of most hotly-contested categories, Innovations in Customer Experience was rife with cutting-edge solutions that are specifically designed to improve the customer experience. Notably, of the many products submitted in this category were focused on emulating customers' actual experience, in several instances drawing that data directly from the customer. While Net Promoter Score is being widely adopted, there can be a disconnect when the Net Promoter Score and other key performance indicators are not showing an issue and a customer is experiencing one. 

Nokia presented its Customer Experience Index (CEI) solution. Part of the company's larger Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution, CEI integrates customer surveys that provide actual customer feedback and enables operators to drill into the underlying issues and even proactively identify other customers who may be affected. JDSU entered its TrueSpeed solution, which emulates actual customer traffic to pinpoint specific service issues that go well beyond the standard testing that field agents and customers have historically used to measure the quality and speed of their connect. Procera Networks asserted its Next-Generation Mobile Subscriber Management Solution SIM-based solution, which gathers user experience data from SIM-enabled devices to reduced the dependency on network probes. This category also featured impressive submissions from Ericsson, NetCracker, and OnSIP - all innovators in their own right with sophisticated solutions that help operators measure and improve their customers experience. Ericsson and NetCracker both took holistic approaches to CEM, integrating various repositories of data and disparate systems to predict churn, while OnSIP brought real-time customer care into CRM through WebRTC and video integration.