ETIS NEWS

ETIS recently held its 4th Community Gathering, which was kindly hosted by Belgacom in Brussles on 13/14 November 2008. The Gathering was well attended and brought together over 120 participants from 45 companies.

The Gathering kicked off on Thursday 13 November 2008, with a welcome from the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Ray Stewart and ETIS Chairman, Tora Tenden. The Gathering featured a keynote presentation from Peter Rodford, Head of Unit, DG Information Society and Media, European Commission who spoke about the 'EU's policies driving a competitive Telecommunications market and its impact on Telco operators'. Presentations were also given by Jean-Louis Previdi, Vice President & Program Director, Gartner, on 'New Telecom Business Models', and by Brendan Logan, Senior Vice President, Patni Telecoms Consulting on 'Billing challenges in the future Telco Business'. The second half of the day focused on ETIS success stories covering topics like Anti-SPAM, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise Architecture, Procurement & Vendor Management and experiences of knowledge sharing from the CIO Executive Forum.

The second day, Friday 14th November 2008, was dedicated to individual working sessions for the following working groups: Information Security, Enterprise Architecture, Procurement & Vendor Management, Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse and Customer Self Service. There was also an ETIS CIO Executive Workshop which focused on New Telco business models.

This Gathering was an ideal opportunity for all of the members, associates, partners and working groups to get to know one another, learn about each other's activities, plans and expectations and above all, share knowledge. ETIS would like to sincerely thank Wim De Meyer from Belgacom and his team for hosting this event and their excellent hospitality.

The presentations from the Gathering are available on the ETIS Members Corner at: http://www.etis.org/members/area.asp?id=47

If you are not yet a member of ETIS and would like to join next year's Gathering, please contact Fred Werner at: fw@etis.org

ETIS was a partner in the Workshop: "The Data Retention Directive: success story or disaster?" which was held in the EU Parliament in Brussels on 10 December 2008. The Workshop was Chaired by MEP Alexander ALVARO and featured presentations by the EC, UK Government, ETNO, UPC, TDC, O2 and PRISM. The aim of the workshop was to present the state of play of the implementation of the data retention directive after one year of the transposition deadline. The discussions touched upon the challenges linked to the new obligations, the main concerns of Governments and Industry and stimulate possible solutions.

Kurt Sejr Hansen of TDC made a presentation on behalf of ETIS on the 'Practical Implementation of the Data Retention Directive in TDC'. The presentation was well received and generated some interesting discussions. Some of the key issues that were discussed during the workshop were: how do you define 'serious crime'?, does SPAM data need to be retained?, what technology should be used for data retention?, what is the real cost of reimbursement? and how to deal with pre-paid cards and unsuccessful calls? It was also noted that 3rd party data retention services are not admissible in the court of law as evidence which also poses some practical problems.

Data Retention is a topic of great interest to ETIS Members and it is regularly discussed in our Information Security Working Group. ETIS is also a member of the EU Experts Panel on Data Retention. If you are interested in joining the ETIS Information Security Working Group please contact Fred Werner at fw@etis.org
The group is the only Information Security group to concentrate on the telecom market.

It is with great pleasure that we are able to present this year's ETIS Annual Report to our members. The Annual Report provides an overview of our activities, working groups, workshops and members as well as updates on the ETIS Council, Management Board and Central Office.

We would like to encourage you to take the time to browse through its contents and see first hand how your company is gaining value from ETIS membership by participating in the various working groups, workshops and benchmarking studies. We hope that you will find the contents of this annual report useful and informative.

An electronic version of the Annual Report can be downloaded at: http://www.etis.org/about/annualreport.asp

If you need paper copies of the Annual Report please feel free to contact the ETIS Central Office and it will be sent to you.

ETIS recently held a "Green IT" Workshop which was organized on the 19th of September and hosted at the ETIS Central Office in Brussels. The main purpose of the meeting was to exchange information on the activities related to Green IT and to explore the role that ETIS could play relating to this critical issue. The Workshop was attended by participants from BT, Belgacom, TeliaSonera, HP as well as Peter Johnston from EC-DG Information Society & Media.

Each telco presented an overview of it's Green IT status and activities already undertaken or planned. HP also presented some valuable insights as they are considered to be very advanced in the field of Green IT. Furthermore the EU initiatives were presented showing how ICT can contribute to energy efficiency as well as some long term forecasts to consider. All the participants were actively involved to the discussion, agreeing that it is a very interesting topic that needs to be followed up by ETIS in the future. An interesting conclusion can be summed up by a quote coming from the WWF: "Companies have a moral obligation to make money from fighting climate change."

The workshop presentations are now available to all of the workshop participants on the Members Corner of the ETIS website. Additionally, we have developed an online discussion forum dedicated to the 'Green Topic' which can also be accessed via the members corner. For more information on this topic, please contact Fred Werner at: fw@etis.org

ETIS is pleased to announce that Return Path has joined ETIS as an Associate Member. Return Path will be contributing to the Information Security and Anti-SPAM Co-operation Groups. As they continue to grow internationally, Return Path is excited about this forum to bring together the major email providers in Europe to share best-practices, create benchmarking data and form discussion groups on important technology issues.

Return Path's Director of Business Development, Raymond Gannon, explains "I'm excited to be a part of this group and I believe that our participation will expose Return Path to new ideas and solutions for our European audiences. I have heard positive things from long term members and am looking forward to the focused, action orientated discussions amongst their dedicated professionals." And when asked how he plans to work with this organization he said "I plan to be a part of the ETIS Anti SPAM Co-ordination Group and actively collaborate on new measures to prevent spam. In my opinion, this is one of things that will undoubtedly contribute momentum to the expansion of Return Path's European footprint today and in the future."

About Return Path:
Founded in 1999, Return Path helps companies use email more effectively. For email receivers, Return Path works to bring transparent standards to email delivery and filtering. Return Path operates an international data network, bridging the gap between senders of legitimate marketing mails and Internet Service Providers, who are often not in a position to make individual decisions on the reputation of a particular sender. Return Path is smack in the middle, issuing reliable data to help make decisions in real time, reducing the mail volume to critically overworked spam filters at the gateway.

Return Path offers partnering companies who process incoming mail several services such as, the internet's most widely used third-party whitelist, Sender Score Certified. We also provide the Sender Score Blacklist which contains almost 2 million IP addresses at any given time, gathered using a predictive model that analyzes up to 300 variables for each sending IP address. Our managed and operated Feedback loops have effectively increased customer satisfaction and help reduce sender questions and complaints at many top ISPs, including Comcast and Yahoo!. It also provides valuable data for fine-tuning the performance of other filtering programs.

For more information, please visit: http://www.returnpath.net/

ETIS already has a number of working group meetings planned for 2009. Below is an overview of the confirmed Working Group meeting dates and locations for the first six months of 2009.

Enterprise Architecture
WG Meeting
5/6 February
Hosted by DT, Bonn

Customer Self Service
WG meeting
19/20 February
Hosted by BT and CA, London

Procurement & Vendor Management WG meeting
5/6 March
Hosted by eircom, Dublin

Anti-SPAM Co-operation
Group meeting
12/13 March
Hosted by Turk Telekom, Istanbul

Information Security
WG meeting
2-3 April
Hosted by Telecom Italia, Turin

Business Intelligence &
Data Warehouse WG
23/24 April
Hosted by Croatian Telecom, Zagreb

Enterprise Architecture
WG meeting
7/8 May
Hosted by OTE, Athens

ETIS 37th Management Board meeting
27 May
Hosted by DT, Bonn

ETIS 10th CIO
Executive Workshop
28 May
Hosted by DT, Bonn

Customer Self Service
WG meeting
11/12 June
Hosted by TeliaSonera, Goteborg

Procurement & Vendor Management WG meeting
17/18 June
Hosted by CYTA, Cyprus

For additional information on how to join these meetings please contact Fred Werner at fw@etis.org

The 6th IMS World Forum 2009,
28th - 30th April 2009
Barcelona, Spain
www.imswforum.com

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e-telit Editor
Fred Werner - fw@etis.org