The 2019 Pipeline Innovation Awards

The Editor's Choice is a unique category which gives us at Pipeline the ability to recognize the most interesting innovations across all of the Innovation Awards categories. This was not an easy task. 

All of this year's competitors showed a high degree of innovation and finding just a few for the Editor's Choice category was daunting. In the end, however, several stood out from the rest; and CloudSmartz, ETIYA, Inflect, Netcracker and Ziotis topped our list.

CloudSmartz was selected for its Acumen360 solution for digital customer experience management and automation for customer, product and network innovation. Acumen360 provides a solution that works as an overlay to existing legacy environments that helps mitigate legacy operations support system (OSS), business support system (BSS), and CRM investments, yet also provides critical capabilities to monetize new digital infrastructure technology investments to take advantage of digital revenue streams, such as augmented reality, low latency video and IoT.

ETIYA was picked for its Digital Business Platform, which was submitted in the Innovations in BSS category.  ETIYA’s Digital Business Platform packages innovative AI technology into a predefined offering and delivers it on a cloud infrastructure. The platform can be implemented within months, with minimal CAPEX and with the scalability required for rapid, profitable subscriber growth. ETIYA deployed its Digital Business Platform to enable Videotron to rapidly create Canada’s first all-digital mobile and internet provider, called Fizz.

Inflect was selected from the Data Aggregation category for its Global Marketplace solution. Inflect's Global Marketplace and patent-pending Routefinder application is built upon a proprietary data service called Vinyl. The Global Marketplace allows both buyers and sellers of data center, network and cloud services to find routes between endpoints using a browser-based portal—and with the ease of booking a flight online.

Netcracker was picked from the many competitors in the OSS category for its Hybrid Operations Management (HOM) solution, which Communications Service Providers (CSPs) can use to provide convergent services quickly and cost-efficiently, while delivering an excellent digital customer experience and successfully competing with digital market players. HOM operates across complex hybrid environments and helps CSPs capitalize on new market and transformation technologies such as virtual networking, 5G, cloud and IoT services.

And finally, Ziotis made our list for its innovative approach to cross-domain hyper-automation across complex hybrid telecom and enterprise environments. The company's comprehensive Zen product portfolio leverages machine learning and AI, blockchain, OSS and BSS, and robotics process automation (RPA) to provide zero touch automation across silos, organizations and departments, and even with third-party partners. Zen can be used by CSPs and enterprises to fully automate complex and time-consuming manual processes across disparate networks and systems, enable new business models, monetize third-party relationships, move vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data between systems, and enable webscale-like agility.

Picking a winner wasn't easy. But, in the end Inflect was selected as the winner and ETIYA as the runner-up. Inflect showed a masterful application of the underlying technology leveraging patent-pending innovations to create a seamless and effortless user experience. Similarly, ETIYA's innovation illustrated the power of its proprietary technology to launch a successful MVNO business in record time. 

For the rest of the winners all we could do was wait, as it was up to the Innovation Award judges to select the most innovative submission for each of the remaining categories.

It came down to just two finalists in Innovations in Customer Experience: Netcracker and Synchronoss. Netcracker, an experienced Innovation Awards veteran, submitted its Digital Customer Experience Solution.  The Digital Customer Experience Solution determines which new offers are relevant based on factors like spend; lifetime value; eligibility for promotions or upgrades; recent transactions; existing equipment; or changes the customer might have made to his or her profile in the course of a live customer interaction. Synchronoss entered its Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The Synchronoss Digital Experience Platform is essentially a tool kit of capabilities that developers can use to simply and quickly design, deploy, manage and optimize customer journeys across multiple channels from one platform,