With over 1,000 participants gathering to do business at Olympia for IIR's Annual Billing Systems show the consensus was a definite thumbs up for a growing market recovery.

"I was impressed by the serious intent of the attendees to do business", commented Hugh Roberts, Consultant Director of IIR's OSS, BSS & Revenue Management Events. "The focus of the billing community is maturing, and their sights are now firmly set on addressing the end-to-end systems and process requirements to support true financial transaction management. It is always a pleasure to see ideas talked about for years turn into reality, and at Billing Systems this year both the service providers and vendors have moved on from discussing concepts to solving strategic, tactical and operational deployment issues."

Over 300 delegates took part in the multi-streamed conference. "Another indication that the market is improving has been the increased level of technical content in the presentations made by service providers from around the world", continues Roberts. "This is a clear demonstration of the fact that new generation billing deployments are moving out of the laboratory and into real operating environments where they are capturing real revenues from new and innovative services. One word of caution, however, getting the technology right is clearly important, but we must maintain our increased focus on customer-centric thinking and revenue management best practice if we are to continue making competitive inroads into 'non-traditional' markets for telecoms products and services."

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