Presentation Abstract:

Technology solution providers survived the beginning of the global downturn relatively unscathed. In 2008, top line revenues held and bottom line profits, on average, improved for hardware, software, and services providers. However, 2009 is proving a very different experience.

In this opening keynote, CEO JB Wood will introduce the concept of “services without boundaries—breaking down organizational, financial and geographic barriers to maximize services success.” He will start with a review of public and proprietary industry data that shows three distinct trends impacting technology providers in 2009.  Product revenues and margins are clearly under pressure. With a decrease in product revenues, services revenues are becoming a larger percentage of overall company revenues. These economic forces are placing immense pressures on services organizations to secure revenues and improve profitability. However, there is little or no money to invest in traditional business optimization tactics that drive incremental improvements. Services organizations must identify tactics that create step function improvements in profitability.

In this keynote, Mr. Wood will layout a framework services organizations can apply to identify opportunities in both organizational and offering convergence that break down existing barriers in services delivery. Organizational convergence creates leverage between the historically stove piped services lines within product companies. Offering convergence changes the way customers consume technology solutions. Together, these approaches create new models for developing, selling, and delivering technology services to customers with ever tightening budgets.    Finally, Mr. Wood will end with a roadmap for horizon 1, 2, and 3 activities services organizations can pursue to navigate these challenging times.

Presentation Abstract:

Alcatel-Lucent Services for Enterprise gives our business partners global resources that they can use to expand their solution portfolio, gain new expertise, and improve customer satisfaction. Developed to complement their existing services and help them deliver more effectively, our services are available when they need them and can be tailored to meet their unique requirements, as well as their customers' requirements. This session will explain how to deal with day-to-day operations in a competitive environment and how to meet the increasingly complex and unique needs of customers. We'll explain how we grew from a single company model to a blended-services company.

Why You Need to Attend This Session:

The locus of innovation is increasingly moving into IT-enabled, knowledge-intensive services. This presentation will provide important insights into trends and directions that can be leveraged to combat the current economic downturn via the development of innovative services, as opposed to just reducing costs.

Presentation Abstract:

Scores of universities around the world are teaching courses and granting degrees in a subject generally called Service Science. What is it? And why now? Is it a new academic discipline, or a combination of existing disciplines? What need does it fill? What research is it based on? What role does business play in the evolution of Service Science? What need does it fill for companies and national governments? And what can students who study it expect to learn?

Why You Need to Attend This Session:

CIOs are under pressure to lower their costs, and they will mirror this pressure to their IT services suppliers. A better understanding of a CIO’s expectations and constraints might help service providers better answer the call of tenders, reorganize their own business models, and build a more comprehensive business relationship with their customers, which will be the key to business sustainability for surviving this crisis era.

Presentation Abstract:

As far as technology services are concerned, the expectations of today’s CIOs are many. Some are obvious: quality, reliability, responsiveness. Some vague or non-explicit: business models, innovation, predictability of costs. Experience shows that disagreements between suppliers and customers are very often related to a lack of understanding of each other's constraints and objectives. So how do you understand customers’ expectations? How can you help CIOs be successful in their job? Answering these questions is mandatory to securing a mid- to long-term business.

Presentation Abstract:

Service engineering is a notion that arose in the early 1990s. It was meant to bring an engineering perspective into the service businesses, and thus was pretty provocative. A brief characterization of service engineering could be described as: The attempt to use engineering—like models, methods, and tools—to improve the quality and effectiveness of certain classes of services. This attempt was, of course, criticized by prominent members of the services marketing community because it was believed that services, by nature, could not be the object of an engineering approach. Furthermore it was argued that the role of customers in this approach would not be represented appropriately. On the other hand, practitioners from various industries were highly interested in this concept, and by 2000, the discipline was established. This presentation will provide an overview of the achievements in service engineering thus far, and will try to answer the question of whether we really need it.