Enterprise Connect 2011 - What a Show!

3 Mar 2011

The energy was back, the crowds were back, the excitement was back - Enterprise Connect truly delivered. From the exhibit hall to the keynotes to the breakout sessions, it was a top-rate conference. There was lots of traffic on the exhibit floor, and the sessions were mostly full (even my 8 AM UC Market Overview session was full - at 8 AM!). People were there to learn, network, and connect, and they weren't disappointed.

Being that the conference started the morning after the Academy Awards, I'll use an awards theme:

The winner for the best keynote was Microsoft's Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate VP Office Business Productivity Group. He had lots of energy, the demos worked flawlessly (and he presented the demos himself with a "demo guy," which is pretty risky), and the best part - he had Microsoft UC customers on stage to tell their stories. Note to keynote presenters: having customers on stage is a best practice that everyone should employ. We want to hear about how customers are using your solutions to solve their business problems. While I didn't necessary buy everything Kirk suggested - especially his prediction that 50% of the volume in units for Exchange will eventually be in cloud implementations - I thought he did a very solid job of talking about and showing Microsoft Lync's capabilities and integration with other Microsoft products, notably Sharepoint and Xbox Knect.
Second place goes to HP's Arthur Filip, Vice President and General Manager, Technology Services Consulting, Enterprise Business. I know a lot of people won't agree with me on this, but I appreciated the fact that he talked about how UC solves business problems, and he didn't do a deep dive into technology. While the need to focus on business problems is obvious to many of us, too many vendors and resellers focus on the UC technology rather than the business issues and problems it solves. Much of what Filip said is what my UCStrategies colleagues and I have been saying for a long time - UC is a journey, UC is transformational, and it's essential to understanding user's real requirements, have a champion or evangelist to organize the effort, and use a phased implementation plan. The message that Filip presented is extremely aligned with the message that I present about UC, and I felt that he was right on the money.
The award for "Ok, we get it - this is the next greatest thing" goes to cloud or hosted UC. Every keynote and every session I attended talked about hosted services and that the future of UC will be in the cloud. I agreed and disagreed with what I heard. While I expect small companies (under 50 employees) to embrace hosted solutions in the near future, I think it will take more time for large enterprises to get on board. Most large, geographically-dispersed enterprises will need hybrid solutions, and will need to integrate cloud solutions with their premise based solutions. This will take some work, and it won't happen over night. I clearly see the benefits of the cloud and I expect about 30% of UC solutions in 3-5 years to have some element of hosted services, but I think the challenge of integrating on- and off-premise solutions will be more difficult than the vendors and service providers are making it sound.
The "Most Popular" award goes to Interoperability - it was abundantly clear that attendees want more vendor interoperability and believe that the vendors aren't doing enough in this area. During the opening session, Jim Burton asked the audience to clap if they thought interoperability between UC products from different vendors was important, and there was a big round of applause. He then asked if the audience felt that the vendors were delivering this, and there was silence - no one clapped. While Marty Parker and John Bartlett pointed out during the locknote that interoperability isn't always needed and it's based on the organizations' use cases, the question about interoperability is top of mind for most organizations; in fact, two of the questions I was asked during my UC Market Overview session was about interoperability and how to integrate Microsoft with various switch vendors. This won't be resolved any time soon, and I believe that the system integrators will play an important role in making various products work together.
And the award for "What Will We Hear Even More About Next Year" goes to social media. Social media (or social software) is THE hot topic, and we're at the very early stages of integration of social media with both UC and with the contact center. By next year's Enterprise Connect, there will be many more customer examples and use cases of this integration, and maybe there'll even be customers willing to discuss what they're doing in these areas.