TM Forum brings together Communications, Media, Advertising and Web Leaders for T8 World Summit
TM Forum, the world’s premier industry group focused on business effectiveness for the communications and media sectors, announced today that a high-powered group of executives are confirmed to meet at the T8 World Summit, part of the Forum’s Management World conference (Nice, France, May 4-8th). The invitation-only summit will bring together C-level executives from major players in the communications, media, advertising, banking and web sectors to discuss how to generate new sources of revenue through innovative business models.
The approach – sometimes called a ‘two-sided business model’ – involves providing business-to-business services to other service providers, leveraging investment in IT infrastructure by reselling services based on core competency. For example, Amazon have expanded beyond their original online retailing position to become an early market leader in cloud computing, web services and opening their platform to 3rd party retailers. Amazon’s CTO Dr. Werner Vogels will brief the summit on progress they are making in this area.
With many markets approaching saturation point and the world in the grip of a global recession, new business models offer a unique opportunity to deliver new and innovative services without significant investment. The Summit will look at how web, communications, media and advertising companies can work together to leverage their individual expertise, offering new profitable services which in turn hold the potential for economic growth.
“Downturns in the market can be very productive at getting people to innovate new ideas,” said Keith Willetts, chairman of TM Forum. “The aim of the T8 World Summit is to uncover the issues the industry needs to solve to make these services a practical reality. We intend this initial meeting to kick-start a significant new industry group within TM Forum that complements our work in enabling profitable communications, media and advertising services.”
The T8 World Summit will be moderated by former AT&T Chief Transformation Officer, Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi along with Eric Pulier, chairman of SOA Software. “We are delighted that such a prestigious group of executives from all sides of the digital marketplace will gather in Nice to kick-start a whole new chapter for web-based ‘cloud’ services. This initiative brings together previously separate industries to identify the opportunities and challenges new business models present,” commented Willetts.
The T8 World Summit builds on an already impressive backdrop of the Forum’s flagship Management World conference, which will explore many similar topics through an impressive keynote line-up and presentations from more than 200 industry experts. The conference exclusively includes Forumville, offering live demonstrations of TM Forum’s Technology Catalyst work, including two projects which utilize Amazon’s cloud computing environment. “The Forum’s not just talking about these issues, our members are already working together to address them at a practical level,” added Willetts.
