Abstract
(Englisch)
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The primary objectives of the project are:
1. To capture and consolidate the achievements of the ACTS programme (in particular Guidelines and trials results).
2. To package and actively promote those results in a unified, attractive way.
3. To channel the results to key audiences outside the ACTS community.
4. To facilitate the streaming of selected ACTS results into industrial and market exploitations of solutions based upon advanced communications products, services and applications
The project is divided into 5 Work Packages, including project management. Martel is active in 4 of these.
The project is analysing the needs of, and promoting the ACTS results to, a number of specific business sectors. In the first year these have been:
§ Telecommunications network operators
§ Standards bodies
§ Corporate network managers
§ CATV
§ Regulators
§ Flexible working (including disabled people)
§ Education
§ Learned societies
The idea behind this project is that there are many players outside the ACTS programme who are likely to:
· have a key role to play in the early launch of Advanced Communications Services,
· be early adopters of those services,
and would therefore be interested in ACTS results. However because the results are distributed across the Deliverables of over 200 projects, they need to be consolidated, packaged and channelled to these external audiences.
The project's channelling products include:
· Customised briefings for external readers in ten important business sectors;
· Summaries of all ACTS Guidelines;
· A library of ACTS trials results and product opportunities;
· Over 100 publications about ACTS achievements in the technical and trade press;
· Over 20 presentations on ACTS results to high profile conferences and influential industry bodies;
· Roadmaps describing four scenarios for the commercial exploitation of ACTS results;
· A website and CD-ROM presenting the project's outputs.
The Swiss partners also produced briefings specifically for Switzerland.
Martel played a major role in the production of all of these channelling products apart from the roadmaps. Specifically, we :
· Produced and distributed briefings for 2 key business sectors as well as two national briefings for Switzerland;
· Wrote summaries of 6 ACTS Guidelines;
· Managed the library of trials results and wrote 64 reports for this, mainly based on visits to trials;
· Wrote, and had published, 21 articles about ACTS in the technical and trade press;
· Gave presentations on ACTS to 8 influential bodies and conferences;
· Edited much of the content of the project's website and CD-ROM.
The success of the project was due to a combination of:
· sector representatives, who established dialogues with key players in their sectors about the type of information they wanted about ACTS,
· technical analysts and authors, who consolidated the ACTS results and packaged them for channelling to the individual business sectors.
Martel played an active part in both of these roles.
The conclusion of this final report is that ACTSLINE has succeeded in fulfilling its original objectives and has contributed significantly to raising the visibility of ACTS achievements amongst external audiences. Martel has played a major part in this success and has raised the visibility of Switzerland in collaborative European research.
Martel's achievements
Martel was responsible for editing the NIG-G4 Guideline, within the GINA project, and used its participation in ACTSLINE to provide the majority of the information from trials which was used in this Guideline.
Martel was responsible for writing 6 of the Guideline summaries and for producing the table which showed different business sectors which Guidelines were most relevant to them. We also reviewed all of the Guideline summaries written by the other project partners.
Martel led the trials capture work within the ACTSLINE project and was responsible for visiting 26 trials and writing 30 full reports and 34 summary reports on the trials. Martel also produced the table suggesting which trials were likely to be of interest to players in particular business sectors.
As well as reports on individual trials, Martel produced and maintained a database summarising all trials activity within the ACTS programme.
Martel played an active role in reviewing the information within the roadmaps and in providing supporting evidence from ACTS trials which could be used to generate or refine the roadmaps.
Martel was responsible for writing (or co-writing) 20 of the published articles, and for giving 8 of the presentations to major conferences or influential bodies.
Martel edited the ACTS FITCE Forum issue and wrote the editorial and 3 of the articles.
Martel was responsible (with Telscom) for the Telecom Network Operators sector. As part of this activity, we made contact with a broad cross-section of the network operators in Europe to understand their needs and to feed the relevant ACTS results to them. Because of resource limitations, much of this contact was by phone or e-mail. However, face-to-face meetings were held with Eircom (Ireland) and Telefonica, as well as informal discussions with Sunrise and BT. Articles were published by Martel in the British Telecom Engineering Journal (which is widely read around Europe) and in Swisscom's COMTEC journal, as well as in the FITCE Forum. A briefing was prepared, and regularly up-dated, which was sent to the main business sector contacts. Apart from contact with individual operators, presentations were also given to Eurescom, ETSI and ITU-T - thereby reaching a broad audience of strategists.
Martel was also responsible (with TeleCommunities) for the Broadcasters sector. In this case, Martel concentrated its efforts on building a good relationship with the European Broadcasting Union. As a result of discussions with the EBU, we were invited to speak at their Forecast 99 conference in Geneva and to contribute an article to their Technical Review.
Martel was responsible for editing much of the content on the website and worked in partnership with Telscom (who designed and maintained the site) to make sure that the information was always relevant and easily accessible.
Martel took an active part in all of the conferences (being involved in all work packages of the project) and contributed to many of the Deliverables associated with planning and monitoring the project.
Benefits for Switzerland
Switzerland has benefited from participation in this project by influencing the way that information is gathered and presented to the business sectors in general, but also by having a direct route into data on the ACTS programme customised to meet Swiss interests.
Switzerland has benefited from:
· Access to the results of ACTS in a form which looks at the whole programme, rather than as individual projects, and are therefore more understandable from a strategic perspective
· Access to the ACTS results in a form tailored to the needs of Swiss business sectors, rather than based around technology boundaries.
· A better understanding of how ACTS results can be moved forward into commercial exploitation within Switzerland.
· The presence of active Swiss participants in the ACTSLINE project who could capture, and respond to, the needs of Swiss organisations.
· Briefings tailored to Swiss needs, eg the briefing on ACTS prepared for participants at the ACTRIS Swiss Information Society event explaining the relevance of ACTS results to Switzerland.
· Greater visibility around Europe of Swiss participation in advanced communications R&D. When visiting trials, writing articles or making presentations we have always made it very clear that Martel is a Swiss company.
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