Innovation and customer centricity have always been at the core of our strategy, and we at iBwave pride ourselves in challenging the status quo. This is reflected in the way we work, in the wide range of products and services that we introduce to the market and it’s also what ultimately led us to make some significant changes to our fourth Annual User Group.
For those of you who have attended our previous events, you might remember that they were typically held in conjunction with the DAS & Small Cells Congress which takes place in Vegas. This year however, we felt that we needed to step out of our comfort zone and break the mold to be:
- closer to our customers => we hosted a standalone event in Dallas where we have the largest customer base
- closer to their real-world issues and interests => the idea here was to focus on bringing tailored-content, “for users, by users” so we adopted a much more user-driven approach by engaging our users early in the planning process. In addition, we also made the decision to spread the event over two days so as to cover a broader spectrum of topics
iBwave’s CTO, Dominique Gauthier talks the talk in his “best Texan, French accent”
Although it is early days, this new format certainly seems to have paid off, and we are very much encouraged by the echoes that we have received to date, from first-timers as from returning participants. Our team too commented on the fact that it had generated fresh, new synergies among stakeholders and that many ideas had emerged from the discussions.
But overall, let’s be fair: the quality of the event was also largely due to the fact that it drew a varied audience that was made up of leading industry experts, power users with an intimate knowledge of our product suite, and champions who are continually collaborating with us to push the technology envelope!
TJ Forner @ AT&T opens up on iBwave’s great innovation story, describes it as the “best standard for standardization within DAS engineering”
Much credit also goes to our newly-created User Group Committee (made up of Thomas Gourley and Doug Kwiatkowski from Verizon Wireless; Vincent Rhone from AT&T; Luigi Tarlazzi from Commscope; John Barcomb from Sprint; Dwayne Baucom from American Tower; Aroosh Elahi from Ericsson and Lee Scott from Goodman Networks) who took on the challenge and who did a phenomenal job!
With their help, we were able to provide a truly open forum where we could share best practices, learn from each other, align priorities and just as importantly, develop a shared vision for our industry which continues to show strong signs of growth!
“It’s all about developing smarter technologies that allow you to get it right, first time while reducing the project life cycle and increasing efficiency” – Amit Verma @ MobileCEM Labs
For our part, the event certainly highlighted the need for further collaboration between industry players so that we can be better prepared to scale and address the indoor challenges associated with different types of environments and business models.
We were also inspired by the rich and constructive dialogue that took place during the panel discussions and round tables, the valuable insights that we collected with regards to our product roadmap, as well as the enthusiastic responses that the live demos generated.
Live demo of the seamless integration with the collection tool from MobileCEM
And talking of enthusiastic responses, how great was it to break the news regarding the latest Mobile 2.0 release in front of our participants and give them all a 3-month Mobile Planner license so that they can play with the new features! Pretty cool way to conclude the event, wouldn’t you say?
Our Mobile version 2.0 boasts advanced usability and propagation features!
So, all in all, we had a fantastically productive time and we learnt a lot from this experience – including the fact, in the US, iced tea is served “black”, ie: unsweetened ( “Sweet tea” is what you should ask for if you want to enjoy a “Canadian iced tea”), and that salted chocolate banana bites, particularly when prepared by the celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck are truly delicious!
Check out the photo gallery that is posted on our Facebook page for a few of our top picks!
We very much look forward to continuing the great discussions that we started about the future of the in-building wireless industry, and thank all those who participated and contributed to the success of our event! Cheers everyone and see you again soon!
