Last week’s
Enterprise Connect Digital Conference & Expo 2020 offered the same wealth of information, insights, and guidance that our presenters have always offered at our in-person event, and as always, enterprise professionals were the speakers who offered some of the best guidance. You can get a very quick summary of insights
here, but I want to call out a couple of points I found especially useful:
* The relative ease and clear success of the shift to remote work in many enterprises was built on the work that these organizations had been doing long before anyone had heard of COVID. It’s a case where being a relatively early and committed adopter paid off.
As an established Slack user, “we were just sort of incidentally perfectly prepared for the transition to remote work,” said Neal Obermeyer, senior manager of channel effectiveness at TD Ameritrade, during our Enterprise Summit last Wednesday.
Likewise, “We had spent the last 18 months plus installing a solid foundation, so overhauling everything from the networks, ensuring the offices had SD-WAN, diversified service, IP telephony [using RingCentral] across every single one of the offices, including all of our support centers. We were in a good spot,” said David Baker, CIO, Pacific Dental Services.
* As enterprises look ahead to build on the new environment, they should remember that they have the leverage in their vendor relationships, and they should use it. “What I see us doing over the next year or two is really leveraging [existing cloud and application deployments]; … we’re now in a good position to where we’re starting to push the vendors on things that we’re looking to do,” said Gary Kohlheim, director of services management for Walden University.
This was a major point of emphasis in the virtual event’s opening session, a broad-ranging discussion between my colleague Beth Schultz and three leading industry analysts and consultants. When the topic of interoperability came up, all three panelists stressed that the significant strides we’ve seen toward video interoperability came about only because of strong pressure from customers.
That’s just two areas where we got straight talk from enterprise representatives, so if you didn’t tune into last week’s virtual event, I encourage you to watch the replays of our customer-based sessions: our Women in Communications roundtable, the Enterprise Summit, and our Diversity & Inclusion networking session.
You can also join in on a “
virtual replay” that we’re doing for five of the breakout sessions that were among last week’s most popular. You can register and sign into the virtual event environment next Wednesday, Aug. 19, and replay these sessions, with the speakers on hand to answer your questions. You can see the list of sessions and the times that speakers will be available
here. (If you’ve already registered for the virtual event, you can just go back into the
event environment and go directly to the sessions you want to watch.
All the rest of the content is also available on demand, and it’s all timely, useful, and relevant. Just go into the virtual event environment, click on Agenda, and watch any session at any time. I hope you take advantage of this great, free resource.
