Getting Ready for UC at Enterprise Connect 2014
Getting Ready for UC at Enterprise Connect 2014 by Marty Parker
It is going to be an interesting Enterprise Connect in Orlando this year from March 17 – 20, 2014. There is a shift in the tone to the new reality of enterprise communications. As interpreted from the agenda, the new reality could be summarized as:
The PBX is no longer the center of the universe. Where once Enterprise Connect (nee VoiceCon) was all about the PBX vendors, surrounded by a variety of appliances and administration tools, it is now a show about all the choices for enterprise communications. A glance at the sponsors list will make this clear; 4 of the 8 Diamond sponsors are not PBX producers; only one (maybe two if you count Interactive Intelligence as well as Mitel) of the Platinum sponsors is a PBX producer. The bulk of the sponsors and exhibitors are focused on communications tools that are PBX-independent (lots of video and conferencing), on mobility, on networks and network management, and on some applications.
There are many choices for UC platforms: IP-PBX; converged networks and SBCs; collaboration and document software; and/or innovations. The keynotes (Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft) illustrate this most vividly! Each comes from a different direction – traditional PBX, converged network, or collaborative and document-centric software. Each also has their own view of the future. You’ll see this theme in great detail if you come to my session “UC Options: The Many Ways To Do UC” on Wednesday, March 19, at 2:30 PM; we will have panelists from all three of these options (and a couple of other options, too), so you won’t want to miss this as the most head-to-head comparison you’ll see at the show.
Cloud options abound: We all know that broadband IP networks enable us to put our computing, and therefore our communications applications, essentially anywhere. Cloud is the name for this new thrust to outsource enterprise communications, whether to a shared "multi-tenant" service or to a "hosted instance" of your own UC system managed by a specialist. We will address this directly in the general session on Wednesday at 9:15 AM in which Brent Kelly, Dave Stein and I, along with three leading vendor panelists, will closely examine, “Cloud-based Communications – Is It Right For Your Business?” We will debate the economics as well as the functionality and the risks. It’s the big debate for 2014.
Disruption is not only visible, it is featured: As more evidence that this show is not just the purview of the PBX vendors, there is a WebRTC ‘Conference-in-a-Conference’ on Monday that will highlight the possibilities to create communication solutions almost anywhere on the network without any PBX infrastructure, using only a web server and a network. There are many other disruptors claiming the future, too, from software-based communications to SBCs to conferencing or video as the future of communications.
User experience is key, with emphasis on video and mobility, but with some major missing pieces. The video and mobility conversations are everywhere in the program. However, surprisingly, two pieces of the user experience are missing, except in the ‘Options’ session mentioned above. First, there is no sponsorship and only a few sessions on social networking inside the enterprise, even though Jive Software, IBM Connections, Microsoft Yammer/SharePoint, and Google Docs are all doing their best to shift the user experience to their social platforms. Second, there is also almost no visibility of UC built into enterprise business applications. It seems very likely that the entire IP-PBX sector may be caught unaware as folks like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and many vertical market software companies build the optimal communications into their application software.
The key word may be ‘and’ not ‘or’. A number of sessions are positioned by their titles and descriptions as a battle of choosing between one direction OR another. One example is the session on Tuesday, March 18, at 2:30 PM titled, “Cisco vs. Microsoft: Placing Your Strategic Bets.” The description suggests this is a choice between “the data network/datacenter… or… the desktop/applications/messaging space. As we see with almost all of our UniComm Consulting clients, the answer is to create a balance of the various UC options (see above), not to choose one OR the other. In my opinion, an all or nothing choice of only one option is almost sure to disadvantage anywhere from a quarter to a half of all employee "usage profiles" in the enterprise; as we have seen from the BYOD phenomenon, the users won’t tolerate that and will find their own options (reference the applications comment above). So, think about "and" as a theme word at Enterprise Connect 2014.
As in past years, the UCStrategies team will be leading the UC conversation at Enterprise Connect 2014, including Blair Pleasant’s annual “UC Market Update” at 1:30 PM on Wednesday, March 19. We’ll post the schedule of all our sessions later in February.
Most of all, hope to see you there! It’s the dawn of the new age of enterprise communications. The new options are mature and the choices are being made. Come see what the entire community – vendors, organizers, peer customers, analysts and consultants (yours truly) – have to say about all of this! It’s worth the time and expense!