It’s difficult to know how much value to attach to surveys like that showcased this week at the FT-Telefónica Millennial Summit in London (that’s FT for Financial Times). They always throw up interesting statistics and observations but I’m often unsure as to exactly what they mean.

The announcement that OSS rivals NSN, Ericsson and Huawei have signed an Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreement to cross-license their respective OSS interfaces to one another raised a few questions as well as a few eyebrows. That these players have decided to trust one another and adopt a simpler way of sharing proprietary interfaces is remarkable enough, but the timing of the announcement, coming as it did less than 24 hours before the opening of this year’s TeleManagement Forum’s flagship event was as surprising as it was, one suspects, deliberate.

Enterprise clients typically represent the subscriber group with the highest value for mobile operators. Mobile operators typically have whole departments dealing with large enterprise customers, but so far they have paid limited attention to the most important need of the mobile workforce: excellent mobile coverage in the office. This has been a reason for enterprise clients churning, especially when fierce competition allows competitors to offer better levels of service.

But this is now changing and enterprise specific technologies are evolving as the need to retain these high value customers becomes stronger.

‘Big Data’ is one of those buzz phrases doing the rounds in the industry at the moment. It’s an adjacent topic to cloud but is being thrown around in much the same way, often prefixed by the question: “What are you doing about…?” Well, with the costs of storage plummeting, it’s becoming clear that the answer to that question is you should be storing everything.

With virtualisation evolving rapidly and open source in favour, telecom equipment vendors could all end up developing what is effectively the same software to manage the cloud. But what they have to bring to the table is telecom-grade experience.

Before the dust settled on its previous acquisition (Acme Packet for $2.1b), Oracle announced it is acquiring North American vendor Tekelec. Oracle started in database systems and is a leading player in this field – even in mobile, it is now growing its infrastructure reach and will surely expand its business in mobile networks.

I remember speaking to a senior director at a Middle Eastern telecoms operator five years ago about Formula 1 motor racing and Vodafone. He’d got used to seeing Vodafone’s name plastered all over race tracks as a sponsor of first the Ferrari and then the McLaren teams. But he didn’t know that Vodafone was a telecoms operator (Vodafone did not operate in his country) – he thought it was a sports marketing brand.

As an analyst exploring new digital services, I try to practice what I preach. I designed Informa’s Telecom Cloud Monitor with Caspio. I use Evernote for project and information management. My interactions are logged on Salesforce.com. I like Skype, and I’m warming to Lync (my 9,000-employee firm just switched to Microsoft Office 365 – hooray!). And yes, I’m using Twitter,  LinkedIn and experimenting with [...]

Technology innovation appeared thin on the ground at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but the challenge of enhancing performance and capacity by better utilising existing network resources remained a key focus for many network vendors.