Last week we were invited by the EU funded Project VALUE-IT to participate as technology providers in two focus groups meetings, – Telecommunications and Banking -, taking place in Madrid. In both cases, playence provided its point of view regarding how Semantic Technologies can help solve some of the problems this verticals are currently facing. In both cases, participants were companies in the top 10 of their fields in Europe.

In the case of the Telecommunications sector, it was clear, from the beginning, that their main problem was related with the inherent cost to minimize the time to market of a new product or service. Within the Telco market, being agile and dynamic is one of the main strenghts when trying to get more customers or to retain them. Another very important aspect deals with improving the relationship with the customer, especially in those fields where personal users are involved. And, of course, system integrations, like any other else, especially in this climate of company concentration and big fusions.

In the specific case of Banking and the Financial sector, their most important issue was, again, system integration, but also they felt that applying Semantic Technologies to their websites could improve significantly, the way in which users obtain information from them. In particular by easing, the language gap that already exists between the bank offer and people’s needs.

We, in playence, think that the market is already mature for having these kind of technologies industrially spread, not only in Telecommunications and Banking, but also in many others sectors, like Retail, Media, Tourism, Public Administration and, in general any sector characterized by any of the factors:

• Knowledge-intensive documentation
• Interoperability among different players
• Interaction with the end user
• Manual and repetitive knowledge-intensive processes.

Time will tell, but we feel these topics are getting more and more attention now.