Industry thought leader, Maribel Lopez, discusses the M6 Mobility xChange, an innovative enterprise mobile and wireless event she will be chairing in September. The M6 Mobility xChange is a Retail Dive partner.
Q: What makes the M6 Mobility xChange unique when you compare it to other industry events you attend?
A: M6 is not a trade show or traditional conference. M6 is a hosted model event with the goal of creating a win-win experience for both enterprise attendees and sponsors. It’s three-day networking and business information exchange. It truly creates maximum value for attendees in terms of education, peer interaction and networking, as well as ROI for sponsors who are looking to build relationships with qualified decision makers. Qualified attendees are fully hosted so there is no cost for them. M6 is focused on six key vertical segments within the mobile landscape and invite a limited group of 150 guests from leading enterprises who are all qualified and selected. Selected attendees are hosted so there is no cost to them to travel and attend.
Q: What are the major topics you plan on addressing at M6 2013?
A: We see three major trends that are pervading the mobile space. The first is the consumerization of technology, which includes BYOD. The second is the “Appification” of the enterprise. Businesses across the globe are building strategies to mobile-enable workflows and applications. At the same time, businesses are struggling with new security models that support securing content across a wide range of corporate and personal-owned devices. We’ll cover all of these and more at M6.
Q: What are the leading trends in the Mobile and Wireless space that will transform the enterprise in the future?
The rise of mobile has changed customer and employee expectations. Customers expect companies to respond to issues and opportunities in real-time. Employees expect the business to provide access to meaningful information on the go and at the time of decision. Transforming business processes requires delivering valuable insights from data in near real time. Businesses must combine mobile data with big data processing and analytics to store, analyze and convert numerous data sources into context that is related to the customer, the market or a situation. Companies will transform business processes by using contextual services. These new contextual-enabled business processes will deliver an employee or customer the proper information at the moment of need.
Q: How can event like M6 (focusing on six key enterprise verticals) help the attendees and the communities they serve?
Over the past three years, mobility has changed tremendously. While mobile is ubiquitous and pertinent to any industry, the real business value of mobility happens when a company uses mobility to change business processes. These processes by their very nature are vertical. We’re creating content to provide insight into how mobility can transform business processes within different verticals. However, M6 is also about networking and learning best practices from others. This is an opportunity to learn about how other verticals are using mobility and brainstorm methods for adapting best practices from one industry into another.
Q: When and where is the event?
A: September 15-17 at the La Costa Resort, San Diego, CA
About M6 Event Chair - Maribel Lopez
Maribel Lopez is the Founder and Principal Analyst of Lopez Research, a market research and strategy consulting firm that specializes in IT and communications technologies. Her research agenda focuses on understanding how mobile transforms business by integrating with other market trends such as social networking, cloud computing and big data technologies. Maribel brings both enterprise and consumer market expertise that has been honed from two decades of product management and technology marketing expertise as well as industry analyst roles.
Prior to founding Lopez Research, Maribel was a respected analyst for more than 10 years at Forrester Research. There she provided analysis on multiple topics, including carrier network and service strategies, enterprise communications, and consumer markets for voice, video and data. Before she joined Forrester, she worked for Shiva Corporation, where she held positions in strategic marketing and product marketing as well managing a competitive product-evaluation laboratory. Prior to joining Shiva, she worked for International Data Corporation as a data networking industry analyst. Maribel began her career at Motorola, holding positions in finance and global corporate development.
