TODAY is the first-ever VoiceCon Virtual Event! You can still register and attend the conference, take part in chats, and visit sponsors' virtual booths. Click here for program and registration!
Here's the VoiceCon Virtual Event Conference Program. Once you register, you can go back and view anything you missed, either today or anytime for the next 12 months:
11 AM--NOON EDT
Keynote Address: Constancy Amid Change: Surviving and Thriving While Migrating to IP and Transitioning to UC
Presenter: Brent Kelly, Senior Analyst & Partner, Wainhouse Research
Economic uncertainty, chaos, turbulence, and risk--ours is an era of opportunity when we can show our strength and entrepreneurial prowess as we deal with all of the change being thrust upon us. In the communications sector, great upheaval is occurring both with the technology and the vendors offering technology. This industry is in the midst of a massive migration to IP communications coupled with the transforming effects of unified communications capabilities to boot. In this keynote, Dr. Brent Kelly, Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research, will clearly reveal the market trends and transitions that are occurring and how you and your organization can effectively deal with both the migration and transformation that are thrust upon us. He will give real world examples along with proven technology adoption principles that will help you not just survive, but thrive in the turbulent world of enterprise communications.
NOON--1 PM EDT
Conference Session: Business Success Through Better Collaboration
Sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent
Speakers: Arthur Brant, Director of IT, Abilene Christian University
Fernando Egea, Director of Solution Architecture, Alcatel-Lucent
Convergence of desktop applications, such as instant messaging, presence, content sharing and real-time communications, is changing how knowledge workers collaborate. In addition, the near ubiquity of multi-modal mobile communications devices is bringing this collaboration into the heart of daily work flow and business processes. Companies and organizations now rely on unified communications to facilitate how we work, learn and collaborate. In this session, an enterprise end user will join with a technology executive to explore the most recent trends in unified communications technology; discuss lessons learned from early introductions; and describe customer case studies. These real-world stories will demonstrate the enhanced user experiences, improved business processes and more rapid ROI resulting from improved collaboration.
VoiceCon Chat: UC Basics to Best Practices
Chat Leader: Gary Audin, President, Delphi, Inc.
Join one of VoiceCon's most popular tutorial instructors for an informal, interactive chat designed to answer your questions and share your ideas about how to implement UC infrastructure and applications effectively.
1 PM--2 PM EDT
Conference Session: Where's the ROI in Unified Communications?
Sponsored by Interactive Intelligence
Speaker: Dr. Don Brown, CEO, Interactive Intelligence
Most businesses are plagued by latency and human error. Files get routed to the wrong people, projects get sidetracked. In the end, businesses lose significant time and money.
While traditional business process management systems were designed to automate tasks, they've also been historically costly and complex to deploy.
Finally, there's an answer.
Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA) uses core UC components – multichannel queuing and routing, presence, collaboration, and VoIP -- to automate critical business processes. The best news? CBPA's process-flow definitions, graphical interface, tracking and reporting capabilities give businesses the most cost-effective, simple, yet complete method for automating business processes.
Bottom-line: By reducing processing time and increasing processing accuracy, CBPA delivers measurable ROI for unified communications.
Join us for this session and hear Interactive Intelligence CEO Dr. Don Brown share how CBPA can benefit your business, including actual examples from applied CBPA products.
VoiceCon Chat: Adding Mobility to UC
Chat Leader: Michael Finneran, President, dBrn Associates
Mobility is one of the key pillars of Unified Communications. In this hour, you're encouraged to air your concerns and bright ideas on the subject, in a discussion led by one of the industry's top experts on mobility.
2 PM--3 PM EDT
Conference Session: SIP Technology Update
Presenter: David Bryan, Internet Communications Strategist, Cogent Force LLC
This session will first provide a brief participants a basic introduction to SIP, including what SIP is and why it is important. Following the introduction, the session will explore where SIP is being used in the enterprise today and answer questions about the role SIP plays in deployments: Which products are using SIP? Where is SIP being used (or not used)? What do you need to know to deploy a SIP-enabled solution in your enterprise? The session will conclude with a Q&A session for participants.
Conference Session: Social Networking in Enterprise Communications: Key Differentiator or Frivolous Gamble?
Presenter: Brad Shimmin, Principal Analyst, Current Analysis
This discussion will examine the use of social networking techniques and services in enterprise communications environments, and where the real business benefits lie. Brad Shimmin, Principal Analyst, Collaboration and Conferencing will present views on how business expectations and requirements related to social networking are being met--or not--by the software and services community, with advice on evaluating, how to best deploy community software, the most important concerns to address and which suppliers to be thinking about.
VoiceCon Chat: Contingency Planning for a Consolidating Industry
Chat Leader: Steve Leaden, President, Leaden Associates
Industry consolidation continues, and will affect your buying, support and management decisions. In this session, a leading consultant will help you plan for whatever changes may occur in the vendor landscape.
3 PM--4 PM EDT
Conference Session: Unified Communications Enabled by Sprint Converged Solutions
Sponsored by Sprint
Speakers: Dan Dooley, Steve Coker, Mike Browne of Sprint
Virtually wherever and whenever business customers connect, Unified Communications (UC) enabled by Sprint will follow--from the desk phone to computer to the mobile phone -- with voice, data, messaging and conferencing applications effortlessly flowing from one destination to the next. Sprint enables UC to help businesses and government agencies increase productivity and customer satisfaction while driving down costs. Simply stated, unified communications transforms communications into a seamless, integrated user experience, automating tools such as email, voicemail, instant messaging, calendars, fax and audio/video conferencing. Sprint is teaming with best-in-class partners including Cisco, IBM and Microsoft to enable UC solutions leveraging:
* Sprint Global MPLS: A virtual private network service offering a secure, robust and reliable transport network
* Sprint SIP Trunking: A Session Initiation Protocol service that includes local and long distance services
* Sprint Mobile Integration: Technology extending communications system (PBX) functionality to Sprint phones for mobile employees within the UC environment
Sprint will demonstrate the capabilities of UC as well as present how Sprint has deployed this strategy for its own employees resulting in $6 million in annual savings with an incremental $2 million savings every 18 to 24 months.
VoiceCon Chat: SIP Trunking
Chat Leader: Marc Robins, Managing Director, SIP Forum
Preparing for our 4 PM session, preview issues on SIP Trunking with the managing director of the SIP Forum.
4 PM--5 PM EDT
Conference Session: Architectures for UC
Presenter: Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting, Co-Founder UCStrategies.com
Architectural elements and layers are key to planning and implementing Unified Communications (UC). This virtual session will lay out the architectural layers and the key elements of each layer, building on the popular VoiceCon Tutorial, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" This session will provide a framework to identify the architectural elements that need attention for the cost-saving and high-ROI UC solutions you are planning for 2009-2011.
Conference Session: SIP Trunking
Presenters: Lisa Pierce, Founder & President, Strategic Networks Group
Richard Shockey, Technical Working Group Chair, SIP Forum
SIP trunking is one of the hottest areas in communications technology today. The promise of SIP trunking is that enterprises can build true end-to-end IP wide area networks that support real-time traffic, and in the process can realize significant savings over legacy services such as PRIs. But the promise of SIP trunking remains unfulfilled for too many enterprises. In this session, the industry's leading analyst of carrier services for the enterprise will describe and evaluate SIP trunking services offered by the providers. She'll be joined by a technologist who will describe the interoperability roadblocks that stand in the way of more customers getting SIP trunks.
