BELTUG Update February 2011

Lobbying
1. Results of the Survey on F2M disappointing
2. BELTUG position on draft bills for electronic communications
3. BELTUG consultation: your questions for Belgacom

Networking
1. A warm welcome to our newest members
2. Twitterwall
3. Successful Member Forum and Visionair
4. Member advantage: 50% discount for itSMF Conference

Information and vision
1. New BELTUG Replay and cases online
2. New presentations and reports available
3. First Executive X-change - A new BELTUG initiative
4. Report on Smartphone Security from ENISA
5. Security SIG gets going

Agenda

In both January 2011 and August 2010, fixed telecom operators benefitted from lowered mobile termination rates, as imposed by the BIPT. To see if the cost savings are being passed on to customers, BELTUG gathered information from some 50 big and medium-sized enterprises. Disappointingly, only half indicated that they are paying lower prices for their fixed-to-mobile calls.

Danielle Jacobs concludes in an Opinion in Datanews that in fact many customers are not benefitting from the reduction.  Any person or company that is not attentive and assertive risks paying too much.

What’s more, the BIPT abolished set-up costs in February 2008 - but three years later one-third of the respondents are still paying them.

Were you notified by your operator of your cost reduction? Or did you take the initiative to ask for lower prices? Perhaps you should: we hear from our members that it's worth the effort. Have a look at BELTUG’s recommendations for negotiating a price reduction (Dutch/French).

Minister Van Quickenborne and the BIPT organised a consultation on the draft bills covering electronic communications, for the transposition of the European directives. BELTUG provided its comments on the draft.

The deadline for transposition is May 2011. BELTUG will continue to follow the procedure very closely, to ensure that all the concerns of the business ICT users are addressed. 

On January 27, 25 companies participated in the 'BELTUG challenges Belgacom' meeting. Specifically, BELTUG challenged Belgacom on three topics: Explore, Network Transformation Outlook (Move to All IP) and mobile SLA. To prepare for this meeting BELTUG asked members to share their concerns, to allow us to ask the right questions and give valuable feedback.

In fact, we received so much input, and the members at the meeting had so many questions, that is was impossible to address all of them at that time. We agreed with Belgacom that we will summarise the questions, and Belgacom will get back to us with their responses. We will keep you informed.

Networking

We would like to welcome all our new members who joined last month: Bridgestone Europe, SAS Institute, Juniper Networks, MI4C, Outpost24 Benelux,Certipost, TMVW.

2011 started well, with over six activities in a single month. More than 180 members subscribed to the first Member Forum and Visionair of the New Year. The combination of interesting presentations and New Year’s cocktail in the fully booked Salons de Romree were the right recipe to feed our networking and discussions. Have a look at the delegate list of companies. For those of you who couldn’t be there, we filmed the speech of Duco Sickinghe CEO of Telenet.

On March 27, itSMF will hold its annual conference in Antwerp. The theme this year is “Leadership leads the way”, and the conference aims to explore the concept of leadership in all its aspects.
BELTUG members are entitled to a 50% reduction on the conference fee (€ 195, standard rate € 395).

At BELTUG events, case studies play a very prominent role. This month, we have three new case stories available: UZ Antwerp, UZ Leuven and Xerox. There are already three Replays available: presentations of Sita/Suez, Nexans, Selligent is added. Now you can listen to a replay of selected presentations, synchronised with the slides – all on our website.

We also have lots of new presentations for you to check out this month:
• Migrating to UC: Have a safe journey! Easynet
• From vision to reality – a couple of practical UC cases, Orange Business Systems
• How to simplify the proliferation of technologies, Avaya Belgium
• Picture this: video as an increasingly important element in UC, Cisco Systems Belgium
• Unified communications without a PABX, Microsoft Belgium and Luxemburg + Interroute Belgium (MS Partner)
• How Selligent implemented OCS in its very demanding communications environment, Selligent NV/SA
• Ready for IPv6? Cisco Systems Belgium
• Reflections on an RFP, one year later, VRT
• Feedback BELTUG activities at the Member Forum
• The Digital Wave 'Driving the Future' Telenet

On January 17, the first meeting of our new Security Special Interest Group was held at ING. Although a recent initiative, it already counts 31 companies as members. At this meeting we discussed the topics for the next meetings.

If security is a special priority for you, perhaps you would like to take part in the Security SIG? It’s open to all BELTUG members who are actively working in this domain. Just send us an email.