(Hong Kong – December 10) Cisco Systems and Ericsson each went home with three trophies in Telecom Asia’s 3rd Readers’ Choice Awards while Huawei Technologies and Amdocs won two awards each.
Cisco was named the Best Network Infrastructure Provider of the Year -- the overall best vendor award -- as well as the Core Network Vendor of the Year and Carrier Ethernet Vendor of the Year. Cisco regional director for business development Stephen Patak was presented the best of the best award by CSL CMO Mark Liversidge.
Ericsson's president for Hong Kong and Macau, Laurence McDonald, was on hand to receive the award for Wireless Network Vendor of the Year from Hong Kong Broadband Network MD of business development Wai-Bing To. Ericsson also picked up the Best Infrastructure Management Vendor and Video Platform Vendor of the Year awards.
Huawei Technologies was recognized as the FTTx Vendor of the Year and Wireless Broadband Network Vendor of the Year.
Amdocs won the BSS Vendor of the Year award for the second straight year and was honored with a Special Editor Recognition Award for the Most Innovative Vendor of the Year. Telecom Asia's editors, which presented three Special Editor awards, selected Amdocs for its newly introduced real-time data analysis and decision-making platform.
Openwave Systems won Best Network Management and Optimization Solution for is Media Optimizer, which allows operators to analyze and implement network optimization based on real-time conditions.
The third Special Editor Recognition prize -- BSS Best Practices -- went to Intec for the second straight year for its solutions that help operators reduce capex and opex by running on carrier-grade, low-cost commodity hardware.
Winning awards for the second year running were Ceragon Networks (Microwave Backhaul), IBM (Cloud), Juniper Networks (Metro Networks), Nokia Siemens Networks (Best Managed Support Services) and ZTE (Broadband).
First-time winners this year included Andrew (In-Building), Ciena (Optical Networks), HP (SDP), Microsoft (Unified Communication), NEC (Femtocell), Openwave, Samsung (Wimax), SAP (BI), VNL (Green Infrastructure). Genband, which acquired Nortel's carrier VoIP assets, won the Carrier VoIP Vendor of the Year award.
Twenty-one equipment and software suppliers received 27 awards, which were presented on December 9 at a ceremony in Hong Kong by representatives from 15 service providers. Executives from AT&T, BT, C&W Worldwide, China Telecom, China Unicom, CSL, Global Crossings, Hong Kong Broadband Network, Hutchison Telecom, NTT Com Asia, Orange Business Services, SmartTone-Vodafone, Telecom Malaysia, Telstra International and Verizon Business were on hand to celebrate with the winners.
This year’s awards program was expanded from 22 to 27 categories to better cover the breadth of the ever-expanding telecom landscape.