CIO's expectations

After lunch, Didier Lambert, CIO, Essilor and Former President of CIGREF gave a presentation on how the CIO views the world and the impact it has on service providers (many of the people in the room). It was interesting, insightful and full of good advice on the CIO's role (he's not the end customer - his users are) - and what that means from a relationship perspective.

He used real-world examples to show that disagreements between suppliers and customers are very often related to a lack of understanding of each other's constraints and objectives.

The session was packed (as were all of the keynotes) and there were some excellent questions at the end.

First concurrent breakouts

We had two concurrent breakouts: the Industry Panel on Service Science and Service Innovation: How to Drive Economic Return and a member case study on Balancing Flexibility and Standardization for Optimal Service Delivery in Heterogeneous Markets by EMC.

I had the chance to attend the first breakout which Thomas Lah moderated. The panelists included:

• Prof. Dr. Gerhard Satzger, Director, Karlsruhe Service Research Institute
• Dr. Wil Janssen, Manager of Business Development, Telematica Instituut/NOVAY, The Netherlands
• Kris Singh, President, SRII & Director, Strategic Programs, Service Science Research, IBM Almaden Research Center

The discussion was engaging and clearly crossed the boundaries that often separate academic and business discussions. There clearly is a lot that all of us can and should be doing in this area and this really panel discussion really highlighted a couple of unique opportunities for industry and academia to collaborate.

Where is the "Science" in Services

Day two opened up with Dr. Richard Straub giving a keynote that talked about the global transformation going on that's moved us from an agrarian society, to an industrial one to now a services-based one.


He gave a number of great examples from IBM's transformation from a hardware company to a services company, and then applied those to the general concepts to what Service Science is and why we should care.

Some of the key issues that Dr. Straub covered on Service Science included:

• What is it?
  
• 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?
• What can students who study it expect to learn?

It was the best example I've seen bringing together the concepts out of academia and showing how important they are to industry and how we need to work together.

Our Exhibitors

After our first two keynotes we moved into the cocktail reception and there was a lot of dialogue between our partners and our members.

A number of great conversations got started here that carried on into the networking dinners and then the bars later on that night.

Alcatel-Lucent Services for Enterprise

Stuart Cooper, Executive Vice President, Global Services, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Group followed the opening keynote with a great presentation talking about Alcatel-Lucent's transformation to a services company.

Stuart talked about each stage of the transformation that Alcatel-Lucent has gone through that gives their business partners global resources that they can use to expand their solution portfolio, gain new expertise, and improve customer satisfaction. These services and solutions were 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.

The prize for the best and most interesting examples so far definitely goes to Stuart as he described some of the work they had done with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The examples around transformation in Endonasal Brain Surgery were extremely well done and we're thankful that this happened way after we had finished lunch. :)

This was a great example of how a company has transformed from a single company model (traditional hardware provider) to a blended-services company.

"Services without Boundaries"

JB Wood, CEO of AFSMI, SSPA and TPSA, kicked off the event with a session called "Services without Boundaries" noting that 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.

JB talked about how companies can begin breaking down organizational, financial and geographic barriers to maximize services success.” He started 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.
• There is immense pressure on services organizations to secure revenues and improve profitability.

Unfortunately, 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.


The presentation then turned to an important framework that 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.

JB ended the presentation with a roadmap for horizon 1, 2, and 3 activities that services organizations can pursue to start navigating these challenging times.

TSE 2009 Kicks off Today

Today starts the beginning of our Technology Services Europe Conference 2009 - Services without Boundaries in beautiful Barcelona. There is a definite energy in the air as service leaders from the biggest companies on the continent and from around the world gather for the next three days to discuss how to successfully meet the needs of European customers in this challenging economic environment.

We have world-class executive speakers from IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, Agilent Technologies, McAfee, EMC, OpenAir, Sun Microsystems, Philips Healthcare and more attending the event. There are representatives from 16 different countries and 60 companies, and a number of key partners are also attending the event including OpenAir, ISS, CLIC, HHL, SRII, Service 800 and Impact Learning Systems, Martin Wiesend & Partner and ITG.

The event today kicks off at 16:00 with JB Wood, President and CEO of AFSMI, SRII, SSPA and TPSA talking about Services without Boundaries. He will be followed by Stuart Cooper, Executive Vice President, Global Services of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Business Group.

Following the opening day keynotes we will have a reception with our partners and then networking dinners in the evening.

We will be posting live updates throughout the event with pictures, interviews and snapshots of the key insights. Stay tuned for more.