Honoring the Long View

Innovation is often thought of in terms of “light bulb” moments, but the winners of Telephony's 2008 Innovation Awards also stressed the importance of remaining dedicated to a project or effort, sometimes over a long period.

For example, the work that created the Verizon Enterprise Center, the richly featured online portal for Verizon Business customers that won the Most Innovative Enterprise Service award, began at MCI back in the late '90s, said Mark Chodoronek, executive director for customer enablement and billing assurance for Verizon. Similarly, Bianca Hennings, director of public relations and marketing for PhoneFusion, which tied for Most Innovative Mobile Service, cited a decade of hard work and dedication by her firm.

At Towerstream — which won two awards for its WiMAX service, claiming Most Innovative Broadband Wireless Service and Most Innovative Small Business Service — the innovation began when the company turned to using wireless technology to make broadband services more available and affordable for small- and medium-sized businesses, said CEO Jeff Thompson. The light bulb moment came later, when Towerstream lowered the price of its service from $1500 to $999 and saw sales take off, Thompson added.

Chodoronek, Hennings and Thompson were among the nine winners on hand Sept. 30 in Chicago at Telephony Live, where the awards were handed out by Telephony Editor-in-Chief Carol Wilson and Jack Field, vice president of carrier Americas product management for ADC's global connectivity solutions, which sponsored the awards. The winners were chosen from open nominations made between May and July. Judges included members of the Telephony editorial staff and three guests: Daniel Briere, CEO of TeleChoice; Cindy Whelan, analyst with Current Analysis; and Vince Vittore, program manager with Yankee Group.

Award winners included:

Most Innovative Broadband Wireless Service and Most Innovative Small Business Service:

Towerstream's WiMAX offering
“I think this speaks to how far ahead of the market our judges believe Towerstream to be in using this wireless technology to deliver broadband access to businesses,” Carol Wilson said. Jeff Thompson accepted the award.

Most Innovative Enterprise Service:

Verizon Business' Verizon Enterprise Center, an online portal providing a one-stop resource to communicate, monitor, make changes and report on Verizon Business services.

“Verizon has done a great job of enhancing its customer portal over the past 12 to 18 months,” Cindy Whelan said “The portal offers a wealth of information to customers, with a particular eye to enhancing features for multinational users.” Mark Chodoronek accepted the award.

Most Innovative VoIP Service:

Paetec's session initiation protocol trunking offering
“Paetec offers a hosted [voice-over-IP] service with features that are comparable to competing offers from the RBOCs and other providers,” Whelan said. “Where Paetec shines against these competitors is in its focus on customer service.” Sanjay Hiranandani (left), senior vice president of engineering for Paetec, accepted the award from Jack Field.

Most Innovative Disaster Recovery Service:

Telesphere's hosted PBX
“Telesphere hosted PBX service is a practical application of technology in an innovative manner with real payback to the customers,” Wilson said. “The example cited in the awards application, of a Tennessee company hit by a tornado and a fire in the same week but without losing a single voicemail message, is compelling.” Sanjay Srinivasan, chief technology officer for Telesphere, accepted the award.

Most Innovative Mobile Applications Service:

Tie, ChaCha and PhoneFusion
ChaCha, a mobile search service, allows users to call or text questions via mobile phone. ChaCha's guides use powerful tools to search the Web and quickly return succinct, relevant answers via text with a Web reference link. This human interface dramatically expands the types of questions users can ask well beyond simple phone numbers or addresses. Chris Brown, chief operating officer for ChaCha, accepted the award.

PhoneFusion's Fusion Voicemail Plus is a free mobile handset application that integrates messages from multiple voicemail systems into a centralized location, visually displaying text headers containing unique identifiers, such as true caller ID names. With the touch of a button, users can scroll, select and listen to messages in order of choice. The service runs on top of a broadband data offering from a wireless provider. Bianca Hennings accepted the award.

Most Innovative Fixed/Mobile Convergence Service:

XO Communications' XO Anywhere offering
“This is an excellent use of FMC beyond the typical ‘saves money’ approach,” Daniel Briere said. Nicola Jackson, director of IP and converged services for XO, accepted the award.

Most Innovative Technology Deployment:

Verizon's FiOS gigabit passive optical network rollout
“Our judges were impressed by the commitment Verizon has made to deploying the latest in PON technology on a scale unmatched in North America and elsewhere,” Wilson said. “Innovation comes in many forms, and in this instance, Verizon is being rewarded for its broader vision of the next-generation access network.”

Added Vince Vittore, “This is certainly the greatest leap of faith we've seen in the access world in at least a decade.”

Vincent O'Byrne, director of FTTP architecture and design for Verizon, accepted the award.

Most Innovative Managed Service:

Tata Communications' managed DDoS detection and mitigation services
Tata's network-based distributed denial-of-service detection and mitigation security services provide a fully integrated solution for global, real-time application-layer analysis of the IP traffic traversing its global IP backbone. The services monitor and analyze customer traffic in real time and on a 24/7 basis, providing proactive notification of actionable events, helping to improve customers' visibility into the security and availability of their networks. Rakesh Shah of Arbor Networks accepted the award on Tata's behalf.