I originally wrote this as this week's VoiceCon eNews newsletter, forgetting I already had copy lined up for the week. It pretty much sums up my take on VoiceCon Orlando 2009, and I hate to let anything go to waste, so here's one final wrapup before we move on to planning VoiceCon San Francisco 2009.VoiceCon Orlando 2009 was a great show. We didn't really know what to expect going in; we knew that pre-registration was strong, but given the tough economy, nobody had any way to predict how many would show up. In the end, we hit all of our marks and everyone I talked to, and heard about, reported satisfaction with the attendance and the quality of the program.
I think we also saw something of a breakthrough in terms of the way our speakers addressed themselves to the issues that enterprises are dealing with. In the User Forum and similar types of sessions, we heard a lot about cost savings and ROI, which was completely unsurprising. What came as a pleasant surprise was the number of end users who had begun talking about UC as a productivity generator-by which they didn't mean you can save a couple of minutes by UC-enabling your IM system for better presence awareness and communications-modality switching.
What they meant was that they understood, and in some cases had even begun to act on, the opportunity for communications enablement to enhance business processes. Karen Bailey, VP, Voice and Communication Services at Wells Fargo, made a specific point of this during the User Forum on Thursday. I suspect that one thing that led her to this point sooner than many others is, as she explained in the session, Wells Fargo's voice organization is very tightly integrated with its contact center organization, and the bank is very deliberately looking for ways to both integrate non-contact center employees into contact center functions, and also to give contact center-flavored applications like screen pops to employees in other parts of the business. The contact center has always been on the cutting edge of communications' integration with business processes, and so it makes sense as a proving ground.
Oh, and Karen also happened to mention that she's hoping to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of her end users off of desk phones-recalling a point that Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft had made the day before in his keynote, when he likened desk phones to Brother word processors and said you don't need them any more.
Those are just a few quick things that I pulled out of my notes to highlight what I think was really important about this VoiceCon, which was that people seem to be ready to really begin moving in new directions, really starting to plan with an eye toward the new ideas that UC brought with it a few years back.
As for attendees' view of the economy, the most interesting view I got in this regard was an informal poll that Joel Hackney, president of Nortel Enterprise Solutions, took of the crowd of about 90 Nortel customers that showed up to a really cool Birds of a Feather session we had for Nortel customers on Tuesday afternoon (you can see the writeup of that session here). While these folks had come to talk and hear about Nortel's situation, their own enterprises ran the gamut of size, vertical industry, etc.--as any gathering of Nortel customers will.
When the subject turned to the broader economy, Hackney asked them for their own predictions about when the economy would begin to revive. By far the largest group expected to see no real improvement until 2Q 2010; nearly as many hands went up for 1Q 2010. Not more than half a dozen expected to see a rebound beginning this year.
And yet they were at VoiceCon, because their enterprises go on; they have procurements they need to do or opportunities that they see, and they knew VoiceCon was the place to shop around and get the facts. We're grateful to everyone who came to Orlando last week, and look forward to VoiceCon San Francisco in November.
