Dispensing with the small talk, kudos, thanks and superlatives—they're too many; suffice it to say the show exceeded our wildest hopes—here's what I saw and learned at Enterprise Connect last week that I thought was significant for the industry:
* SIP Trunking Still Rules:Man, can this topic still pack 'em in. Once again our SIP Trunking sessions--run by the excellent Lisa Pierce, Sorell Slaymaker and Irwin Lazar--were the biggest draws in the conference. Anecdotally, I’d have to say I heard more people talking about SIP trunking in terms of the architectural/applications benefits—i.e., the ability to centralize your communications apps and seamlessly deploy UC functionality across your network. That really seemed to resonate even more this year than previously. That said, there remains an undercurrent of concern about just how easy these things are to deploy, secure, manage, and of course procure in the first place.
* Video Matters: The video sessions also drew much bigger than last year, and video was on everyone’s mind, it seemed. Fred, Crystal and I had a chance to visit with a group of end users one evening last week, and they all seemed to be struggling with the implications of large amounts of video traffic on their networks. None of them had reached a crisis or tipping point yet, but the uncertainty about how video will be adopted, and on what pace, makes them nervous about their networks’ ability to stand up to the test if they don't have some kind of a plan for dealing with it—which obviously requires the enterprise to have some kind of plan for adopting/deploying it.
* People Want Interoperability: The subject of interoperability came up in almost all the plenary sessions, and the breakout sessions that we had dedicated to the subject were jammed. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that a lot new came out of it all. It's the same old routine: Customers say they want interoperability, vendors say they've got it, but somehow nothing works with anything else on anything but a superficial level, if that. I even had one vendor say, "We've been criticized for being too open." It reminded me of an editorial board interview I once did back in my newspaper days, with a local politician who was seeking our endorsement for re-election. We asked him, "What would you say is your biggest shortcoming?" and he looked at us with big, sad eyes and confessed, "I care too much."
* Strategic Planning Also Matters: We ran our first ever Communications Strategies Summit this year, and our sessions on "The Post-PBX Platform" and "The New Emerging Communications Architecture" were both hits. The latter session was a one-man show by Sorell Slaymaker, a consultant with Unified IT Systems who’s also a No Jitter blogger. Sorell presented an approach that he's come up with for mapping out this new architecture, based on the broader context of your technology infrastructure and strategic goals. It's a really smart presentation that I thought made a wonderful jumping-off point for enterprise decision-makers to adapt and react to based on their own situations—I was delighted that so many people attended and found it worthwhile.
The larger point is that I do think enterprise decision-makers are looking for this kind of a big-picture view of where communications fits in the whole technology environment, and more importantly, in the business environment. One of our goals for Enterprise Connect is to make it a blend of strategic vision and technology detail, and this Strategies Summit encouraged us on this course.
Plenty of other topics were hot: Mobility remained a crucial issue, but it seemed to me that it was being "mainstreamed," if that's the right word. It's not being treated as some parasite or alien being that’s invaded the communications host--it's just a part of life. And we devoted a lot of programming to the Cloud and its role in communications, and what I took away from these sessions and more informal conversations is that everyone accepts that the cloud will play a role, but on the customer side at least, and for communications, at least, the emergence of the cloud hasn’t abrogated the need for a business case or a reason to decommission working assets just to move to a new model for the sake of newness.
I could go on, and I will here and there as time goes on. These are the issues that rose to the top when I started thinking back on the show. It really was a terrific event, and I really am grateful to everyone who helped us make it a success.
