On March 2 at Mobile World Congress, Robert Franks, Managing Director, Digital Commerce at Telefónica UK and Cisco’s Kelly Ahuja, SVP, Service Provider Business, Products & Solutions, had a standing-room only crowd as part of the “Personalizing the Consumer Experience” keynote.

During their session, they emphasized how they could understand the consumer as a digital stream of information, not simply isolated pieces of information.  That stream of information, combined with in-person location details, can help both service providers and enterprises improve the experience for their consumer customers.  Both Kelly and Robert recognized that the data has always been available, but it wasn’t easily accessible.  Now Telefónica and Cisco are working together to find ways to use that information to provide a better experience for consumers.

Kelly summarized it well by stating that “personalization is going to be the key to determine the consumer experience.”  Audience members agreed with what was said in real-time tweets.

Both Robert and Kelly discussed Read More »

Tags: mobile world congress, mwc, privacy, security, Service Provider, wi-fi, wireless

With Cisco’s cloud-hosted, analytics solution Mobility IQ, retailers and their partners can now gain invaluable insight into their customers’ “showrooming” habits, understanding more about why customers browse in-store – but buy online. This breakthrough solution is making it easier to capitalize on untapped business opportunities and create impressive customer-focused campaigns.

Wouldn’t it be great to show her your in-store item (with a price match!) for that online deal she’s browsing? With Mobility IQ, you can do it right now.

She’s here already. Now’s the time to let them know you’ll match that online price. Read More »

Tags: analytics, mobile world congress, mobility, mobility iq, retail, Service Provider

We’re here in Barcelona for the opening of Mobile World Congress 2015, and the energy is palpable. I have to say I’m pretty excited myself as Cisco unveils a new way of doing business with our service provider customers: Cisco Mobility IQ. Mobility IQ changes the conversation from what the network does, to what value it can create. It provides real-time intelligence for network operations, marketing and business development across Wi-Fi, 3G and LTE networks. By giving providers visual network knowledge for driving new business, you can monetize your network in new ways.

When I say it changes the conversation, this is not marketing hype. Over the past few months I’ve been involved in these conversations with ten pilot customers. In one example we worked with an operator to estimate the ROI on running Mobility IQ on their existing network. We looked at results over a five year period and found Read More »

Tags: analytics, customer trend, mobile world congress, mobility, mobility iq, mwc, operation cost, revenue, Service Provider

As I board the plane ready for the long flights to Barcelona, I’m excited and energised by the prospective of around 100 APAC customer meetings and Cisco technology demos. Hopefully when I get off the plane in the wee hours I’ll remain half as energised.

With all the discussions with Service Provider CxO teams on their expectations for the event, some common top of the mind issues or challenges for Cisco have emerged;

What are the Global trends in Traffic Demand?

Cisco VNI forecasts 10x Mobile Data traffic growth over the next 5-years, nothing new there, but Read More »

Tags: 5G, cisco VPCs, HetNet, mobile world congress, MVNO, MWC 2015, NFV, orchestration, ott, SDN, VoWifi

An invitation to see how Tomorrow starts here at MWC 2015

We all like to talk about creating new customized services for the end user at “web-speed”. But today there is no way to automate service creation, or to dynamically affect changes (augmentation) to existing services without touching the network topology. This is because we use physical service chains across the data plane.  To achieve automated flexibility in service creation we must logically decouple the service plane from the transport plane – a software abstraction from specific network nodes.

As an industry, we lack the ability to: Read More »

Tags: Cisco Evolved Services Platform, cisco intercloud, esp, IETF standardization, mobile world congress, MWC 15, network service header, NFV, NSH, SDN, Service Provider