LONDON -- Light Reading (www.lightreading.com), the leading online publication for the telecom industry, and Heavy Reading (www.heavyreading.com), its prestigious market research division, will be hosting their first OSS event tomorrow in London.

OSS 2.0: Driving the Services Revolution, hosted by Heavy Reading Chief Analyst Graham Finnie and Analyst at Large Caroline Chappell, will provide thought leadership on new OSS approaches, systems, and architectures that can help service providers successfully capitalize on the wave of next-generation service delivery options open to them. More than 100 executives involved in OSS decision making from service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers are registered to attend.

"Telcos need to deploy, support, and monetize more and more services, and to work much more closely with third-party developers -- and to do that they will need a new strategy for both OSS and BSS," says Graham Finnie. "But there is plenty of controversy about how, and that's what we will be debating this week."

OSS 2.0: Driving the Services Revolution will feature two keynote speakers: Jacqueline Steed, VP Global Service Delivery for BT Global Services; and Michel Burger, Head of Architecture, Internet Services, for the Vodafone Group. Steed will be discussing BT's implementation of SOA, currently one of the largest in the world, in her keynote speech, "BT's SOA SDK: Extending SOA to Your Suppliers and Partners." She will also discuss the business drivers for implementing SOA and the achievements of BT's program to date, which is expected to deliver an 85% reduction in the company's systems estate, large cost savings, and a significant increase in service flexibility. Burger will talk about how service providers should consider their network assets and capabilities as services, and explains how this fits into the necessary transition from traditional telecommunications to the Web 2.0 world.

Along with the keynote speakers from BT and Vodafone, TeleManagement Forum President Martin J. Creaner will participate in a panel session entitled "Restructuring the OSS Sector: Is It Time for a Change?" Other speakers from sponsoring companies will address the conference. Platinum sponsors include Alcatel-Lucent and Amdocs; Gold sponsors include Arantech, ConceptWave, InfoVista, Kabira, and Openet.

Vodafone UK

BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA)