This was my first year attending the WeDo Technologies’ Worldwide User Group and I was excited to explore a new domain. I’m more of a network engineer than a revenue assurance and fraud professional so it was great to get some exposure to this side of the industry and hear other operators discussing their own industry ‘war stories’.
At TELUS, I deal with online charging. Online charging is a real-time activity and, as such, our revenue assurance and fraud management software also needs to work in real-time. The corollary is that the traditional delineation of operational processes between systems, services, and revenue assurance has become very blurred. The User Group provided a fantastic platform for me to see how these can work together effectively to solve common issues.
I was blown away by how refreshingly open the conference was. It demonstrated to me how confident WeDo Technologies is in its software: they were happy to sit back, let us all talk freely and share our experiences with our peers. I have to admit that after listening to the other presentations I was a little embarrassed at how secretive we had been with ours! Since our WeDo RAID system went into production just a few days before this year’s event, we hope to return next year with a few more stories up our sleeve.
TELUS is focused on our customers, and our presentation was no different. In fact, our approach to real-time charging is all about making life easier for the customer. Measuring our operational success metrics in customer terms meant leveraging WeDo RAID7 platform alongside our own technology. The key to our implementation at TELUS was in fact the partnership between Ericsson and WeDo – enabling and facilitating the real-time conduit of feedback from TELUS to WeDo and vice-versa.
A highlight of the User Group for me was Joao Resende’s Product Strategy presentation. His exploration of the broader technology and societal trends is a broadly applicable concrete analysis of the keys to the digital economy of the future, and it demonstrates that WeDo is ready to attack all industries. Daniele Guilinatti’s presentation on behalf of Telecom Italia also struck a chord with me; specifically the view that being curious about data is a fundamentally common point for anyone in the telecoms industry – and really in any industry.
Presentations aside, one thing that really stood out to me was the User Group’s unique approach to balancing industry insight with the networking side of things. No time was wasted but the agenda was never overwhelming. As attendees we were able to gain an incredible global perspective on the industry in a truly honest fashion as well as getting to enjoy a well-thought-out and pretty stellar networking calendar.
Rui Paiva mentioned during his presentation that due to WeDo’s expansion into more verticals, future User Groups may become open to additional industries such as finance and retail. This both intrigues and excites me. The common industry problems faced in telecoms that surround revenue assurance and fraud management will obviously be faced by other industries. The beauty is that the overall strategy and underlying technology to tackle these problems straddles verticals perfectly, so I’m very interested to hear more about this from companies from additional industries.
Note: Alex Roothman is a guest writer on WeDo Technologies' Blog
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