ETI Software Solutions was honored at the 2020 Esri Partner Conference in Palm Springs, CA recently. A partner company in the global Esri Partner Network, ETI was given the Fostering Engagement Award for “compelling use of Esri technology to drive systems of engagement with innovation in telecommunications.”
We spoke to ETI Product Director Brad Hine about how Esri and ETI work together.
Brad: Esri has thousands of software and service partners globally, connected to 80+ different software reseller, distributors and facilities in 100+ countries. The Esri Partner Conference is an opportunity these resellers and partners to converge and learn what Esri is doing for partner enablement, the new technologies they are pushing out in the market and how far they have come in the last year to reach all of their goals. Esri is 50 years old (founded 1969), but over the last five years, there’s been a huge push to try to put geospatial capabilities into the cloud. I saw a lot of focus on what we call “Web GIS” and getting a lot of those applications and functionality into the cloud to make deployments, installation and support for all the users partners and resellers a lot easier and more streamlined. I always enjoy the EPC because of the face time with partners all other the world to hear firsthand what use cases and needs are really driving telecommunications in their market. Of course, it’s great to connect to people through email and through webinars throughout the year, but nothing replaces the experience of the EPC. And a lot of times, the global Esri resellers will have their software partners also in attendance, so you get to hear what specifics products and services are being deployed per region and how it varies, internationally. At EPC, there’s always a ton of product and marketing value, mixed with hands on demos of newer technology and business vision planned for the next 12 months.
Brad: The Esri Partner Conference keynote was Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon Web Services and focused on partners and programs. Sandy talked about her team’s direct focus on the customer, innovation through product, through operational excellence, through the client experience and the plight of developing effective business models around all her customers. From there, her message was driving focus specifically around valuing feedback from the customer, and putting those ideas into the product. “Cool technology” doesn’t drive the product, was her point, but customers confirming there was a crucial need and use case to support was the priority.
She talked about in-depth, customer feedback being paramount to the growth of business and future product vision too. Being “customer obsessed” is the culture that she is fostering at Amazon, so that ideas and needs are always being tracked, collected and evaluated so that awareness of the ever-changing market is a constant. In turn, this future-proofing focus will make the partnership and product roadmaps that much easier to oversee and communicate.
Brad: ETI is a software partner to help Esri improve their telecommunications solutions. Our joint solution helps customers with geospatial intelligence and enhances their experience in collaboration with the software that we already deploy and maintain with our customer base. Esri solutions cover over two dozen industries and verticals, and telecommunications is a new focus for them. As you can imagine, telecommunications, cable companies, satellite companies, all the technologies that exist in that space, large majority of everything they do comes down to a geographic location, whether it’s selling to new customers, supporting current customers, or trying to build into new territories. Our platform, called Unified Device Management, is for real-time remote management of CPEs: automating the deployment and support of data, voice and video services across the service life cycle. From centralized remote provisioning, inventory management, monitoring, event triggering, and support automation. Our integration with Esri’s ArcGIS creates a geospatial dashboard that helps Internet Service Providers (ISP) visually identify and resolve issues — ahead of customer satisfaction thresholds. The geospatial dashboard allows ISPs to monitor performance patterns and trends and to analyze historic metrics of the ‘In Home’ devices, regardless of the technology and vendor.
Brad: Esri acknowledged ETI for fostering engagement, for a compelling use of Esri technology to drive what they call “systems of engagement.” Essentially, what that means is the user experience, the front end that the users use is an Esri product. For our product, we use a geospatial dashboard called Operations Dashboard at Esri. And essentially, we turn real time telecommunications device data, that delivers service to people’s homes and businesses, into actionable intelligence through an Esri dashboard. Essentially, our award is for Telecommunications Innovation, and just creating a better user experience for that.
Brad: Go to Esri.com and no matter what industry you are in, Esri has laid that website out very easily, so you can get in touch with partners from all the industries. It really has a massive library of other software products too, they probably have almost three dozen different either platform applications, or web apps, and things like that partners and customers can use. They host three main events every year. The Partner Conference and the Development Summit actually take place in the same week, that’s actually what I just came from. The User Conference for, shoot, I think almost 20,000 people show up in San Diego every year for the User Conference in the summer. And then in the fall, we go to the GeoConX, which is a telecom-focused conference for them. But there are constant events going on for Esri, every month there is an event, or probably multiple events, globally, with all the Esri partnerships.
