There is an underlying assumption in telephony that people's time is cheap and that network resources are expensive. As recently as ten years ago this was true, but now telephone calls are much cheaper compared to the wages of the average college graduate and Martin Geddes says that telephone services need to improve to reflect that change.
A company can make a tremendous amount of money by simply understanding who its customers are, where they live and how they prefer to communicate. Geddes believes that telecoms need to satisfy the needs of those parties that want to interact with their end-users. He gives some examples and shows us how companies could connect, interact and understand its customers better if telecoms would make small improvements to technology that currently exists.
This issue is especially important because telephony makes up 80% of all telecom business worldwide. Geddies believes eComm is a perfect forum to begin this conversation and that no one telecom can do it alone. It will take cross-industry collaboration and interaction and he provides some interesting solutions in this keynote address.
Martin Geddes is Head of Strategy at BT Design, a division of BT Group. He is acknowledged as one of the leading thinkers and analysts on the future of the communications industry. He has a specialist interest in the future of voice and personal communications, as well as the application of two-sided market structures to the telecoms industry.
Until the close of 2008 he was Chief Analyst at STL Partners, where he co-founded the Telco 2.0 Initiative. This is designed to catalyze business model innovation and collaboration across the telecoms-media-technology ecosystem. He has consulted to many multi-national network operators and equipment vendors on strategic issues, as well as being a key contributor to Telco 2.0 research and conferences.
Martin Geddes also writes a popular telecom strategy weblog. He has been cited by Business Week, Forbes, and BBC News Online, as well as many industry journals. He is a popular presenter at many leading industry conferences.
Before becoming an independent consultant, he was a technology specialist and product strategy manager at Sprint in Overland Park, KS, and is named on 8 granted US patents. Prior to entering telecoms, his early career was as an IT consultant, specializing in high availability and scalability database design at Oracle Corporation, as well as financial transaction processing systems at BancTec Inc.
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Photo: http://america.ecomm.ec/2008/speakers/martin_geddes/