Chris Ballard and other speakers to outline business drivers for device management

Chris Ballard, who leads the TM Forum’s Device Management interest group, will be joined by Abraham Joseph of the Device Management Forum to outline business drivers for device management and the scope and direction of the TM Forum’s own interest group.

The Device Management Summit will be held Tuesday June 24, 2008 at Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara from 8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. in the Great American Meeting Room.

The speaker panel lineup also includes:

Paul Coxhead from Coxhead Consulting who has spent a long career working for BT
Dr. Plamen Nedeltchev from Cisco’s internal IT organization
Chuck Trent, VP Information Technology, Cisco Systems
John Fisher from Peak8 Solutions
Robin Mersh, COO from the DSL Forum
Frank den Hartog, Chair of the Remote Device Management Group from the Home Gateway Initiative
Stan Moyer, President of the OSGi Alliance
Chris Albano, Director - Home Networking and CPE - Office of the CTO from Comcast
Jim Thomsen, Product Line Manager at Westell
Jim Hunter, CTO, 4HomeMedia
Matthew Herdein, Executive Director at Telcordia

More info at http://www.parksassociates.com/events/connections/2008/agenda/workshop_tm.htm

CONNECTIONS Advisory Board Members are Confirmed

All advisory board members have been confirmed for CONNECTIONS 2008. Parks Associates and CEA welcome the following participants:

• Chris Ballard, Head of the Device Sector, TMForum
• Kevin Custis, Consumer Electronics Leader, IBM Global Business Services
• John Fisher, Chief Operating Office & Chief Software Architect, PEAK 8 Solutions
• Rob Gelphman, Chair, Marketing Work Group, MoCA
• Paolo Pastorino, Chief Technology Officer, Home Gateway Initiative (HGI)
• Parag Sheth, Vice President of Marketing, Hillcrest Labs
• Bernadette Vernon, Senior Director Marketing Communications, Motorola

Parks Associates representatives also serving on the Advisory Board include: Tricia Parks, CEO; Stuart Sikes, President; Steve Harvey, Director - Global Events; Kurt Scherf, Vice President & Principal Analyst; Elizabeth Parks, Vice President - Marketing; Mindi Sue Sternblitz-Rubenstein, Marketing Manager.

Peak8 Solutions Announced as CONNECTIONS™ Diamond Sponsor

Parks Associates and CEO welcome Peak8 Solutions as a Diamond Sponsor for CONNECTIONS™: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase.

Peak8 Partners, LLC, doing business as Peak8 Solutions is a software and services company that supports the digital lifestyle. Peak8 offers a comprehensive solution suite designed to improve the productivity and effectiveness of technical support call centers. Peak8 also offers consumer friendly software that improves the stability and performance of digital lifestyle products while empowering users with an intelligent self-service capability.

CONNECTIONS™: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase will be held June 24th - 26th in Santa Clara, CA. This premier executive event focuses on market developments and growth factors for advanced digital lifestyle solutions.

Triple-play Support: The View from the Home Network

Summary information from Day 2: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA

This panel addresses the role of residential gateways, advanced CPE, and service provisioning and networking maintenance tools in reducing support costs for the service provider and enhancing the bottom line.

Duncan Bees, Deputy Chairman of the HGI Quality of Service Working Group, PMC-Sierra, Inc. Wayne Davis, Technical Advisory Board, Peak8 Solutions
Richard Nesin, Vice President, Marketing, CopperGate Communications
Tushar Saxena, Director, Home Networking Technologies, Verizon Communications
Michael Stich, Director, Service Provider Strategic Marketing, Texas Instruments
Ofer Vilenski, CEO, Jungo Software Technologies
Moderator: Kurt Scherf, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Parks Associates


Panelists discussed the required features of an end-to-end broadband and in-home network ecosystem as managed by a service provider. Kurt Scherf introduced the topic by indicating Parks Associates’ research predicts service providers will manage upwards of 30% of the home networks, via smart residential gateways, deployed by year-end 2010. Scherf further indicated that if the industry is to provide sufficient support for advanced services, it must build solutions to address the following issues:

• CPE installation and configuration;
• Service provisioning;
• Diagnostics and monitoring;
• Remote support;
• Telephone support; and
• On-site support.

The panelists represented a diverse spectrum of companies involved in the end-to-end management of broadband and home network services. Wayne Davis, representing Peak8 Solutions, indicated that they are focused on solutions for both the customer as well as the help-desk agent. Rich Nesin at CopperGate discussed QoS monitoring that is made possible through home networking chipsets. Michael Stich at Texas Instruments discussed the company’s DSP-based monitoring and measurement solutions, notably PIQUA™. Ofer Vilenski from Jungo discussed the role of residential gateway software in monitoring, management, and easing service provisioning. Duncan Bees from PMC-Sierra discussed the Home Gateway Initiative (HGi) and its goal of helping service providers deploy more standardized management and provisioning solutions. Tushar Saxena from Verizon said that the service provider’s biggest challenges today are installing broadband and home networking services and platforms with minimal expense; ensuring interoperability between different customer premise equipment; and making troubleshooting more efficient.

Clearly, service providers face growing challenges as they take on the responsibility for deploying a growing number of converged services. Ofer Vilenski mentioned that customer support costs in the first year of a subscriber’s service to a triple-play service can often exceed the dollars spent on the home networking equipment. The panelists believe that there is no firm business model for monetizing support at present, fearing that a fee-based business model may alienate customers today. Instead, enhanced customer support could actually be a good differentiator for service providers to set themselves apart from their competitors.