Industry conferences, like the Pacific Telecommunications Council’s (PTC) conference, are hotbeds of collaboration. They often have a festival-like atmosphere, with multiple stages serving as focal points and every hall corner turning into a hub for deal-making.
This year, Business Messaging appears as a separate track on the agenda, marking the inaugural collaboration between the PTC and the MEF. I too participated in one of the panels, joining John Bruner, Eddie DeCurtis, Steve Legge, and Thais Lima to discuss The Four Mobile Concerns: Privacy, Security, Trust, Fraud.
Generally speaking, my favorite conference panels feature unprompted audience participation in a fun and open way. This was plentiful on day one of the PTC. Across all the sessions, the panelists and the audience collectively discussed questions such as whether we’re doing a good enough job self-policing to the disappointments of 5G rollout. Security, wireless spectrum, phone number exhaustion, and network-as-a-service were just some topics in this intellectual candy store. For this alone, day one was a success. And yet there is room for improvement.
First collaborations can sometimes feel awkward. The “Infrastructure” infrastructure people—the satellite, network, undersea cable folks were trying to understand the messaging world just like the “messaging” infrastructure people—the CPaaS, aggregators, number intelligence folks were trying to understand theirs. Jargons were plentiful, and context was scarce. Thankfully, presentations from Dario Betti and Steve Legge provided valuable level setting. Panelists Soren Schaft and John Bruner also excelled in context setting. Next time we will need more such “Topic 101” for foundational understanding.