By Cara Sievers

According to market research organization Research and Markets, increasing network complexity continues to drive the managed voice and data services market at an exponential rate. Three sessions led by Cisco Systems Inc. today will address this trend and discuss the ins and outs of managed services strategy.

The first panel, The Case for Managed Services, will take place at 9 a.m. and will be led by Vic Northrup, vice president, U.S. service provider sales at Cisco.

Managed services offerings provide two compelling advantages to today’s service provider portfolios, explained Northrup. First, managed services provide a reliable, predictable revenue stream so important to the forward planning of their business. Secondly, there is no question that a managed service is much stickier and provides a tremendous competitive advantage in terms of customer satisfaction and retention.

Northrup will be joined by a panel of service providers who successfully have launched a managed services portfolio that is the cornerstone of their businesses. Panelists include Bob Harvey, vice president at MetaSwitch; Jim Leach, vice president of marketing and sales operations, at Internap; and Chuck Daniels, CEO of ACBB-BITS.

The second session, Architecting Managed Services, at 10 a.m., will discuss the challenges of managing a managed services business. Ciscos director of U.S. service provider systems engineers, Rob Boetticher, will lead the session. He will be joined by Brett O. Theiss, director of product management for EarthLink/New Edge Networks, and Jason Scutt, vice president at Connexion Technologies. Boetticher said he plans to discuss the importance of designing a solution that is efficiently manageable and consistently delivers the quality of service the customer expects. In this session, attendees will hear from service providers who have deployed end-to-end solutions that deliver and manage compelling, quality services.

Rounding out this managed services track is a session titled, Selling and Marketing Managed Services, beginning at 11 a.m. Bill McCarthy, director of U.S. service provider sales at Cisco, will lead a panel of service providers who have built winning strategies into a successful managed services business. We are all in the business of technology and, therefore, the biggest challenge in selling and marketing managed services is giving that component as much focus as the technology, said McCarthy. The entire service creation process, from the product concept, to service design, through service launch, should be given equal emphasis. Further, this entire process should be templated and optimized so new products can be successfully launched in weeks and months, not years.

McCarthy will be joined on the panel by Michael Brandofino, CEO of Glowpoint, and Sid Earley, vice president of marketing at NuVox Communications.

ACBB-BITS www.acbb-bits.com
Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com
Connexion Technologies www.connexiontechnologies.net
EarthLink www.earthlink.com
Glowpoint www.glowpoint.com
Internap Network Services Corp. www.internap.com
MetaSwitch www.metaswitch.com
New Edge Networks www.newedgenetworks.com
NuVox Communications www.nuvox.com