Industry leading keynotes to take center stage at TM Forum flagship conference

MORRISTOWN, NJ - January 11, 2011 - TM Forum today announced an impressive line-up of heavy-hitting industry leaders for the Keynote Perspectives program at its flagship event – Management World 2011. Representing many of the world’s top service providers including Deutsche Telekom, O2 and  AT&T, this line-up of the who’s-who in communications will expose the revolution of innovation taking place in the industry, and unwrap the who, what and how of communications enabling digital life.  Management World takes place May 23-26, 2011 at the new, state-of-the-art Convention Center Dublin in Ireland.

The Keynote Perspectives program is the backbone of the Management World 2011 conference. Offering a variety of panel discussions and talks from the world’s communications leaders, the program tackles the industry’s hottest topics and sets the stage for the entire conference.  Keynote speakers already confirmed for Management World 2011 include:

• Olivier Baujard, Chief Technology Officer, Deutsche Telekom

• David Gurle, General Manager and Vice President Skype for Business, Skype

• Erik Hoving, CEO, NetCo and Member of the Board, KPN International

• Kevin Peters, Chief Marketing Officer, AT&T

• Steffen Roehn, Chief Information Officer, Deutsche Telekom

• Stephen Shurrock, Chief Executive Officer, O2 Ireland 

• Rajeev Suri, Chief Executive Officer, Nokia Siemens Networks

• Ben Verwaayen, Chief Executive Officer, Alcatel-Lucent

• Hans Vestberg, President & Chief Executive Officer, Ericsson

Latest update to the HTK horizon platform delivers truly personalised IVR, SMS and email for contact centres and large enterprises

23 June 2010: HTK, the UK Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company for intelligent customer contact by email, voice and mobile text messaging, has announced the latest version of its multi-media platform, HTK Horizon. 

Horizon version 2.2 provides a dynamic IVR capability that automatically adapts to specific customer needs and preferences, reducing the number of calls met by static push-button menus and generic call-queues. Horizon’s high level of personalisation enables callers to find the information they need much faster, resulting in shorter calls, fewer transfers to live agents and more satisfied customers.

With CRM integration out-of-the-box, Horizon provides extensive easy-to–use options for profiling, classifying and targeting customers down to an individual level. This enables non-technical customer service and marketing managers to create personalised, multi-channel contact strategies – including proactive outbound IVR and SMS messaging.

“Traditionally, IVR has been perceived by customers as a cause of irritation, frustration and even anger, often leading to a degradation of customer loyalty and the destruction of brand value,” explains Marlon Bowser, CEO at HTK. “With customers increasingly demanding a return to ‘good old-fashioned personalised service’, press-1-for-this-and-2 for-that simply doesn’t cut it. This is often compounded by long call queues, making IVR a real bug-bear for customers and a major cause of concern to large enterprises.  Horizon delivers a much better customer experience than traditional IVR and represents a significant and important step forwards in the contact centre industry.”

Service-oriented Integrated Business Architecture provides blueprint for service providers to reduce operating costs; improve business agility and time-to-market

MORRISTOWN, NJ—March 17, 2010—The TM Forum today announced the launch of Frameworx, an integrated business architecture blueprint for service providers in the communications and digital services markets. Frameworx will enable service providers to significantly reduce their operational costs and improve business agility by providing an industry agreed approach for rationalizing their operational IT, processes, and systems.

Frameworx expands and integrates the Forum’s existing NGOSS standard Business Process (eTOM), Information (SID), and Application (TAM) Frameworks into a full enterprise IT and process architecture that also embraces major IT industry standards such as ITIL and TOGAF. The addition of the new Integration Framework to the suite provides a service oriented integration approach with standardized interfaces and support tools. Another major step forward with Frameworx is the introduction of product certification, certified training, a certified TM Forum partner program, and extensive implementation support that will help service providers implement practical solutions based on Frameworx.

“Frameworx comes at a critical time for the market,” said Keith Willetts, Chairman and CEO, TM Forum. “With significant pressure on operating costs, service providers need an enterprise architecture that enables them to move much more quickly; to rapidly integrate new technologies and third party services; to deliver consistent services across the world; and most of all, to significantly cut operating costs. Frameworx provides the blueprint for that agile enterprise—out of the box.”

Dec 3, 2009.  Wilmington NC.  Roger Wyatt, President and CEO of Tynken Interactive announces Signal, a breakthrough in technology that allows teachers to post class notes, homework, schedules and a myriad of other content to their web pages by simply sending an email.   All users need to do is type a code in the subject line, and the system directs the contents of the email to the appropriate section of their web page. "What is really great about this is that it turns the system on its head. What I kept hearing is that the majority of teachers don't have the time or desire to be web designers, and that they are therefore stuck either doing nothing or spending time learning new software" said Wyatt. "Now all they have to do is send an email, and the system does it for them.  This saves a significant amount of time, and makes better, faster classroom communication very easy. First we completely changed the way teachers interact with their web applications. Now we are bringing about a second revolution – allowing them to post to their sites using only email"

"I had been talking with teachers about some of their issues. One of the main ones was not having the time to learn software to maintain a teacher web page. In fact, only 10% of the teachers in any school create a teacher page when given the opportunity. They all said the same thing - "I don't have the time to learn a new system". Now they don't have to. This new system is unbelievably powerful. It is set it up to allow posting of just about anything - scores, schedules, menus, etc - in addition to class notes, homework, and the other class information" said Wyatt.  "And there is no need for training - they just send an email for the instructions and the system emails them the user guide - all 1 page of it. So the technology coordinators don't need to spend any time training the teachers in using the application - there's no training required. And there are built-in safeguards.  For example, if the teacher forgets to put a due date on the homework assignment, the system will not post it, but send an email asking for the due date before posting."