Your resident expert in Expert Briefing #6 will be John Foreman, Vice President of Marketing at CGI.  CGI is the Canada's largest consulting and systems integration company, and has 10,000 employees operating in some 20 countries.  The majority of its current business is in North America.

John began his 20-year telecom career at Bell Canada. He began in the network engineering department, then moved to the Information Technology side of the house where he specialized in network-facing OSSs - network management systems, network administration, and inventory.

From Bell Canada, John joined the Bell Sygma organization. He concentrated on international business development and marketing telecom systems to carriers.  When Bell Sygma merged with CGI, John assumed the position of industry marketing prime for CGI's global telecom practice.

Today, John manages the corporate marketing team at CGI, covering industry marketing, solutions and services marketing, competitive intelligence, and knowledge management.  

This Is How You'll Be Helped By This Road Warrior Briefing #6:

As you'll discover in the Briefing, it's not so much the Internet itself that's turning our industry on its ear as it is the Internet infrastructure. 

When e-business first hit the fan, it was essentially only e-commerce - the handling of transactions over the Internet. Now, of course, we're discovering that e-commerce is only the tip of the iceberg - look behind that curtain and you'll discover marketing, customer support, supply chain, and all the other back office functions that make up e-business.

The word you'll get here from John Foreman is to tread very carefully. You'll learn why you must keep your business strategies closely aligned with your e-business initiatives, and why keeping your eyes firmly trained on your project's metrics is so important.

And telecom has got to start helping clients manage the e-business risk better.

This Expert Briefing will give vendors welcome insight into the sophisticated back-office systems carriers are using to manage the complex transactions that are turning into their biggest bottlenecks. More often than not, these systems are not fully integrated, and manual processes are scattered throughout - so there's great opportunity here for those selling provisioning and service-activation software.

The rise of ASPs is charted and explained, and you'll see how partnerships are becoming more prevalent because of flexibilities inherent in Internet infrastructures.

What does the future hold for crossovers between telecom service providers and application service providers? The short answer is that moving out of their core competencies poses real dangers for the large carriers. 

The long and detailed answer?  You'll find it in this Expert Briefing. . .along with a fascinating discussion of how the changes the Internet is bringing to our industry is impacting the relationship between systems integrators and their telecom clients.

I've just scratched the surface. Expert Briefing #6 gives you an extremely useful and insightful look at one of the hottest and most vital issues in telecom. 

And Foreman backs up his opinions with great, real-world examples that add even more authority to his views.

Table of  Contents

• Moving Beyond E-Commerce
• Telecom's E-Business Payoff
• Large Carriers and E-Business
• Dotcom Mega Sites Drive Mega Data Centers
• The Rise of ASPs
• Silent Partnerships at the Heart of ASP Trend
• ASP Linked to a Large Corporation
• Telecom-in-a-Box vs. ASPs
• The Business of Telecom Systems            Integration and Consulting
• IT Infrastructures Meet the E-Marketplace
• The Transition to New Delivery Types
• Business Model Changes at the Large Consulting Firms
• Biting Off Digestible Chunks of Integration
• Management Frameworks and Project Delivery
• Software Vendor Partnering With Integrators
• Gaining Clients the Hard Way
• Billing Opportunities in an IP World
• E-Centrex and Smart Buildings
• Large Carrier Billing System Priorities
• Marketing Ploy/Systems Nightmare?
• Bundling at a Startup Carrier