According to the GSM Association, 49,000 people attended the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in cold wet Barcelona last week. The weather was not a metaphor for the event which has maintained its glitz even though it is no longer a showcase for all devices new. Sure there were plenty of cool handsets on view, but this indicates how the mobile sector has matured into something different - a theme we will pick-up in research to be published shortly.
But what MWC has really become is one great big networking event, and Forrester was there in the thick of it. Personally met with senior executives from Alcatel-Lucent, Orange Business Services, Cisco, HP, Amdocs, Telefonica, Wipro, Tieto, Oracle, Comptel and Convergys; and had the opportunity to hear what Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) and Motorola had to say in my 2 days at the event. Other Forrester colleagues had equally full agendas, as is the way at MWC. As ever these interactions were as much about explaining our take on developments as hearing announcements (of which there were many).
From these meetings, podium presentations, and a deluge of press releases, four things stand out to me. They are:
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