Upwardly mobile

If you work in the mobile industry, you know it is that time of year again – the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which opens on Monday 22 February. Last year the event saw more than 93,000 visitors from 200 countries – numbers that ‘shattered previous records,’ according to the post-Congress announcement from the GSMA.

And who knows – with the ongoing transformation of our world by mobile communications – maybe this year it’ll be a six-figure visitor count? The opening of the new metro line (finally!) is certainly good news, and will hopefully make Barcelona easier and quicker to navigate for the delegates at the show.

The continued success of the Congress is real testament to the fact that despite our increasingly ‘connected’ society, people still want to meet people. Business relationships continue to be built in Barcelona through people networks as well as via those networks built by mobile operators – despite the travel, despite the cost, and despite the crowds.

There’s no doubt that the week is hard work, but it’s a fantastic opportunity for like-minded individuals to actually meet face-to-face, rather than on email or Skype. There are far too few opportunities these days to have an in-depth conversation, as we tap, swipe, and email our way through the online world.

So of course, AsiaInfo will be in Barcelona, showing how we’re helping the industry to be upwardly mobile – headed for the clouds, no less. This month we announced Veris Cloud Core, a ground-breaking industry initiative that sees us make our entire carrier-grade Veris™ BSS suite available in the public cloud – something that has never been attempted before. We just launched Veris Cloud Core as the first solution to emerge from our new partnership with Amazon Web Services – a partnership that aims to build a world class business Internet platform to enable more companies and industries to collaborate.

We chose to launch Cloud Core to a select group of press and analysts at a rather spectacular venue in London. We told the story of our cloud-based initiative 37 stories high in the Sky Garden at the very top of one of London’s new iconic landmarks, a building known as the “Walkie-Talkie”.

We are committed to transforming the way people think about BSS – to challenging commonly held-beliefs. Our media and analyst guests at the launch event were experts in their own right. They listened to our story, asked challenging questions, and probed our answers. There is no substitute for sitting down and having a good old-fashioned chat with people who are genuinely interested in our business – and, from reading their reports, it seems they were impressed with what they heard.

So we’d be delighted to meet you in person in Barcelona – to have the chance to impress you as well. We are in Hall 7, stand B51, showcasing some of our innovations with live demos from our Veris BSS product suite. All of our booth demos will be running in the cloud – with not a server on the stand. We’ll also be championing omni-channel, enabling operators to integrate social apps and other new options to provide a truly connected customer service, and also showing how operators can effectively monetize customer data through leveraging real-time intelligence.

For a scheduled time, please contact sophie.guo@asiainfo.eu, or just drop by for a chat.