Every year as I get ready to head down to Orlando for Enterprise Connect, I try to compile a list of questions that I have about the industry, that I hope to get some sense of an answer to. Here's what I'm thinking about for next week's Enterprise Connect Orlando 2014:
* Will WebRTC Be as Hot This Year?--Last year, WebRTC was the hottest topic in the industry, and it showed in the well-beyond-capacity crowd we drew for our WebRTC Conference-within-a-Conference. This year, WebRTC is still a hot topic, but I wonder if any of the luster has worn off. I felt as if last year, few people had heard much at all about WebRTC, so everyone thought it might be important to them, maybe even in the near term. This year, there may be just enough knowledge out there about WebRTC to give people a more nuanced idea of when and how it might--or might not--hit their enterprise in the near term.
That said, I expect WebRTC to fill a big room again this year. We've got another outstanding program designed by Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research and Brent Kelly of Kelcor, and they've once again included a session featuring demos of real-live WebRTC applications, and this is what people are hungry for--evidence of what WebRTC can do and is doing in the near-term.
We also have, for the first time ever at Enterprise Connect, a WebRTC Pavilion on our Exhibit Floor. About a dozen sponsors will be on hand to show you their WebRTC wares.
* How Will Microsoft's Competitors Position Themselves in Relation to Lync?--Over the past couple of years, we've seen Microsoft's competitors offer a variety of responses to the threat that Lync may pose to them. A year ago, Cisco mounted a PR frontal assault on eve of the inaugural 2013 Lync Conference; however, before this year's Lync event, Cisco was more muted. Meanwhile, over the past year, companies from Mitel to Avaya have started to call more attention to the way their systems can interwork with Lync.
I expect the co-opetition message to dominate, with the one major exception being Cisco. As Robin Gareiss notes in a No Jitter post this week, Cisco and Microsoft really do appear to be trying to push customers into an either/or decision. We've known this for some time, which is why we scheduled a 3-hour workshop on the strategic decision that many enterprises confront when they have to choose between Cisco and Microsoft.
* What will the Evolution of Video in the Enterprise Look Like?--The last few years have been kind of tough for the video market. Ultra-high-end "immersive" telepresence has stalled out, room systems have seen sluggish growth, and while desktop video has proliferated, quality remains spotty and interoperability essentially nonexistent. So what's the way forward?
Once again, we've enlisted the best team in the business to help try and answer this question, as Andrew Davis and his Wainhouse Research colleagues are driving our Video track. The Wainhouse team will lead sessions devoted to the rise and fall of room systems, as well as looking at leading-edge technologies including WebRTC and Scalable Video Coding.
There's reason to believe video is poised to get hot again. Cisco is planning a push on video at Enterprise Connect, and video is also becoming a big deal on the show floor. We've attracted a lot of vendors from the A/V world, and there's a lot of interest in how room video integrates with enterprise communications systems. This is an area to watch in the future.
* Will Anyone Speak the Letters PBX?--I'm betting they won't, at least not without prodding from Fred or me or another moderator. But they should. PBXs are a reality that has to be dealt with if you're going to eventually move on from them. You can't throw them away, so how do you manage their decline? How do you incur as little risk as possible from them as a legacy technology, so that you can spend wisely on future-oriented investment? That's a challenge that shouldn't be ignored even as we move on to the next generation.
The bottom line is, the show is going to be big: We're tracking well ahead of last year on registration, and our exhibit floor is larger than it's ever been. This market is well positioned to take off. I hope you're planning to join us in Orlando--it's not too late to register! See you there.
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