Report From This Week's Metro Connect 2012

The conference sessions at this year’s Metro Connect in Miami had a great mix of speakers and topics ranging from regulatory issues to mergers and acquisitions to basic business and technical challenges facing service providers and metro operators as they interconnect with each other.  For our company, it was our first year sponsoring and exhibiting.  Last year, we audited the event and came away believing Metro Connect was one of those rare “must do” events due to the promise of meeting with so many top executives throughout the industry.

As Petra Callaly, sales manager with conference organizer Capacity Magazine told me, “this is our premier event where all of the C-level executives in the industry come to meet with each other and share ideas through panel sessions and our networking events.”  We were certainly not disappointed.  I doubt any others were either.  The event saw a series of great talks from service providers and innovative vendors.

Here are few random notes:

The keynote panel was moderated by Dr. Judy Reed Smith, CEO of ATLANTIC-ACM and included CEOs Bill LaPerch from AboveNet, John Purcell from Fibertech and Dan Caruso from Zayo.  There were several notable quotes that came from this humor-filled session:  In describing the lingering concern that some skittish investors still have following the telecom meltdown ten years ago, Caruso compared the investors' memory to that created by a bad tequila experience.  And, LaPerch reminded us all that bandwidth is like space in a closet - can anybody possibly have more than they need?  This panel was very well moderated by Smith and the most entertaining of the week.

There was also substantial representation from the financial sector, indicating - as Frank Weiner, VP of Marketing at Cyan, tweetedCEO Jeff Reedy was joined on a panel by the MEF’s Nan Chen, Sidera’s Clint Heiden and Level 3’s Paul Savill in a great discussion about building profitable Ethernet services in the metro.  Reedy reminded the audience how having a ubiquitous service footprint contributes to the success of Overture’s customers and the role that service management is playing in helping service providers differentiate their offerings. 

While largely a US focused event, I did speak with representatives from Latin American carriers Telefonica Brasil and Internexa from Colombia.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fascinating conversation our VP of Sales Stu Foladare and I had over lunch with Andrew Blum, former Wired