Glenn Osborne, Telstra Wholesale’s Executive Director Sales, attended the Pacific Telecommunications Conference from 17 to 20 January in Hawaii.  In this edition of TWNetwork, he shares his reflections on the conference.

Who attends the event?
Telecommunications carriers, service providers, content providers, vendors, IT solution providers and academics from all over the world (predominantly from North America and Asia).  There were 1200 formally registered participants (up 15 per cent on 2009) and more than 3000 participants in total.

Who spoke at the event?
This year's conference theme was ‘Embracing the Cloud: Enabling Connectivity and Innovation’. Details of the presentations can be viewed here: http://www.ptc.org/ptc10/?page_id=1235

Most participants attend to generate mutual business opportunities, primarily in the international wholesale voice, data and IP areas.

For Telstra Wholesale, our purpose in attending was to learn more about our customers and industry trends and to demonstrate our team’s support for our global customers. We conducted more than 30 meetings with existing and potential customers over the course of the event.

It was very useful to engage with senior representatives from our global customers’ network planning and engineering, and product and commercial areas so we could better understand and be more responsive to their end-users’ requirements for Asia/Pacific and Australian domestic data and IP services.

What high-level trends or themes did you take out from the event?

• IP traffic continues to drive significant demand for growth in international and domestic connectivity.
• US-based enterprise customer demand for Asia Pacific connectivity is starting to show signs of stronger growth.
• There is a requirement for a high level of diversity in network solutions to avoid the damaging business impacts of undersea cable failure.
• MPLS and Ethernet international network solutions continue to be the preferred solution for enterprise customers.
• The number of planned new undersea cable systems in the Asia/Pacific region continues to be strong.

What did you learn that might be of interest to Telstra Wholesale’s customers?

• Enterprise customers are expecting higher levels of diversity and redundancy in global network solutions, with latency still kept at a minimum to support critical applications.
• Reliability, service quality and support are increasingly key factors in Enterprise customer supplier decisions.

More information
http://www.ptc.org/ptc/