I’m sitting in the Spring sunshine (it’s the UK so it’s cold) preparing my talk for the GSC conference in Windsor which starts tomorrow. This is a great venue as it gets representation from major carriers globally mostly concerned with Trading international traffic and the subsequent business processes that support that seemingly simple activity. Few thoughts are paramount, one of them is that I’m presenting on Thursday so there will be a lot of information sharing by then so I hope I would manage to glue the audience to their seats.
The theme of my presentation is Evolution of Partner Settlement. I think that the apparatus, systems, structures and know how which allows carriers to trade voice minutes will soon be in demand to negotiate, set prices and monitor a whole range of services and not just voice.
One particular area I’m interested in is content settlement. How does the carrier (or a cable company) set a fair price with a content creator? How does the content owner verify the final payment? If it’s all about supply and demand, how do providers gauge demand and look at product performance? Who could have predicted that a Danish sub-titled crime thriller, The Killer series, would take the world by storm? ( I guess the writer!)
What strikes me is that what Telcos sell changes, but not how successful business runs. I once worked in a toy shop in a particularly posh part of London. Our buyer made the company a fortune from buying Japanese pencils ( a bit like Hello Kitty) – everyone thought she was nuts. She also ceremoniously dumped the then unfashionable Kermit the frog. This released floor space, which she crammed with pencils and she watched point of sales like a hawk. Nowadays we have sophisticated systems such as ours to do this. But the core things that buyer spoke about, attractive stock, great presentation, customer experience are all key elements of product management and content distribution. Managing the content catalogue and getting value for the content creative and the CSP are critical.
So I’m hoping to have a great discussion about Partner Settlement with people this week about all the hot topics IPX, Content, M2M, Mobile Money – don’t ever let anyone tell you billing is boring.
Blog more later. Have a good week.
Director- Product Management
Anne has over 25 years experience in the Telecoms industry. At her time in BT she developed managed and deployed a wide range of enterprise systems including network, finance and billing systems. Her specialty subjects are billing and wholesale partner management. Anne holds a BA from the London School of Economics and an MBA from the university of Leicester where her specialism was in IT change management.