My next week will be very busy because ITEXPO and other industry events are running in parallel in Miami, Florida. I looked through the schedule and - as of today - I will be presenting in five sessions: three of them are part of ITEXPO while the other two are part of the Ingate Summit.
My first session at ITEXPO is on February 2 at 1:30pm local time and is titled “How Does The Traditional Desktop Phone Fit Into The Evolving Enterprise User Experience?” Frank Stinson from Intellicom Analytics is moderating and I will be sitting next to speakers representing other business phone makers. This session will explore how the trend to Unified Communications impacts the way people access voice services – through telephones but also through soft clients, smart phones, and tablet devices. How should desktop telephones evolve in this environment and how are desktop phone manufacturers planning to increase the value of their products given evolving user expectations?
Then on February 3 at 1pm I will present in the session “Making Telepresence Affordable and Reliable” which will be moderated by TMC Executive Director Paula Bernier and will also include Matt Collier from LifeSize Communications. This session will discuss the perception that telepresence is expensive and will clog your network with HD video traffic. My talk will focus on the reduced network bandwidth consumption (i.e. minimizing or avoiding IP network upgrades) and on the new network architectures that allow for virtualization of conference resources shared within the entire organization or deployed by service providers to serve vast user communities.
My last ITEXPO presentation is in the session “UC Interoperability” on February 3 at 2pm. David Yedwab from Partner Market Strategies and Analytics will moderate and there will be two other panelists: Alan Percy from AudioCodes and Allen Mendelshon from Avaya’s UC Strategy team. The session will address the need for interop and standards in multivendor environments and explore different aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability.
The Ingate Summit is organized in parallel to ITEXPO and I had the pleasure to present at previous Summits, the last one being in Los Angeles in October. This time, the Summit starts early with pre-conference service provider workshops and I will present in the session "Generating Revenue from HD Video” on February 1 at 5:30pm. Joel Maloff of Maloff NetResults is moderating, and I will share the time with Karl Stahl from Intertex Data. Since the audience is serive providers, I will focus on the managed and hosted telepresence services, and also address ITSPs with current hosted voice offering that would like to add HD video services without much CAPEX. I will also provide an update of the industry efforts in the areas of telepresence interoperability and B2B video communications.
My second session at the Ingate Summit is the "Town Hall Meeting: Unified Communications" on February 3 at 9am. The list of panelists is fairly long: Chad Krantz from Brodvox, Dan York from VOIPSA, Karl Stahl from Intertex, Jeff Ridley from ShoreTel, David Yedwab from Market Strategy & Analytics Partners, and Gary Mading from Aastra. I will be wearing my UCIF hat in that session, i.e., representing the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum. In such large panel, there will be no time for slides but we will have a discussion around the scope of Unified Communications, and how different vendors approach UC. I will focus on the UCIF philosophy (certification, not standards development) and call for other companies to join and influence the discussions in UCIF.
All in all, next week in Miami will be very hot - although they do tend to set the air conditioning in the Miami Beach Convention Center on “very cold”. I am sure there will be a lot of interesting discussions and I hope to meet some of the blog readers there in person. For the rest, I would recommend watching the video interview that I will give on the last day of the conference (February 4). I will summarize the news from the conference in my answers during this interview. Once the link to the recording becomes available, I will add it to this blog post.
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