Spirit of Innovation: The 2014 COMET Awards

As guests finish their first course, butlers complete with coat tails and white gloves cut through the center aisle in a procession to escort the next round of COMET awards on stage for presentation. Plates were cleared away as the next group of categories including Innovations in: Support Systems, Customer Experience Management, and Cloud & Virtualization were readied. 

In support systems, two industry giants faced off: Amdocs and Ericsson. Amdocs asserted its Network Navigator product which provides and intuitive visual view of network inventory and enables more users to leverage this information to improve customer care, trouble shooting and network planning. Ericsson, after a wave of acquisitions and facing a transition to virtualization, put forth an end-to-end approach it calls its Service Innovation Framework. Service Innovation Framework combines Ericsson's 100+ years of network experience with its OSS, BSS, and CRM products under its Agile Operator initiative.

Ericsson was also a COMET Innovation Awards finalist in the Innovation Cloud & Virtualization category where they faced TIERONE.  TIERONE presented its NETPortal solution for managing and provisioning physical and virtual network resources. The NETPortal solution provides comprehensive correlation of these assets to services and integrates with other systems for customer care, fault management, and more.  Ericsson presented its Cloud Manager product which allows operators to turn their physical and virtual assets into elastic and dynamically-scalable networks that can be used to support quality and service-level agreements for cloud services, thereby making enterprise cloud service more viable.

In the Innovations in Customer Experience Management category, Amdocs squared off against Netcracker.  Leverging its extensive market research and customer deployment experience, Amdocs created a multi-device, multichannel self-service platform  leveraging state-of-the-art design principals. Netcracker submitted its Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution which correlates the customer to service to resource relationship to measure and prioritize issues affecting high-value and influential customers.