UCStrategies Experts Discuss Upcoming Conference Season

The UCStrategies team is well represented at the upcoming Spring conferences. In this Industry Buzz podcasts, the team discusses the upcoming conference season, which includes Lotusphere, IT Expo and its various co-located events, Enterprise Connect, the UC Summit, and Interop.

The UC expert panel includes Jim Burton, Blair Pleasant, Marty Parker, Don Van Doren, David Yedwab, Dave Michels, and Michael Finneran.

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz, this is Jim Burton and as usual, I am joined by the UC Expert Team. Today's subject is the discussion on all of the conferences that are coming up in the next couple of months. We are absolutely in the season for conferences and we are going to go through quite of number of them. We are going to discuss Lotusphere, IT EXPO, Enterprise Connect, the UC Summit, Smart Grid Summit, and Interop. And to get us started, I am going to turn it over to Blair, my colleague who will be joining me at Lotusphere next week, Blair?

Blair Pleasant: Thanks Jim. Lotusphere is a great event and I am really looking forward to it. It is held in Orlando, which I am not that crazy about but it's a very big event, so it needs to be at one of those large venues in Orlando. What I really enjoy about it is that it focuses in on UCC (Unified Communications and Collaboration), as well as social media - two of the areas that I really focus on and cover, so it is nice to have a conference where I can really get to the meat of my coverage areas.

Lotusphere usually starts with an opening general session and this will be kicked off by Alistair Rennie. And in years past, I assume they are doing the same thing; there is always a surprise speaker from either entertainment or politics and sometimes some pretty big names. So that is always interesting to guess who is going to be the key speaker for that. Then they have some special sessions aimed at analysts, which I will take advantage of.

There will be some sessions on social collaboration, messaging, and there is also going to be the tour of the IBM Center for Social Research, which is headed by IBM's Director of Research, Irene Greif, and that is where we have seen some really innovative things. Some of them never become products, but some of them do. That is where we first saw some of the social media things that IBM has then productized, so it is a really great way to see what they are doing in the near future and some things that hopefully will actually become products.

There is also a lot of customer panels, which is another great way to find out what IBM is doing and what their customers are doing and some of the application implementation stuff that they are working on, and really hearing from the customers, rather than just IBM. That has always been a great way to get some good advice.

There are going to be more keynotes; Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President of the IBM Software Solutions Group. Some breakout sessions just on UCC - just lots of breakouts and roundtables and again focused on unified communications and collaboration, and also social media. So I am very much looking forward to that. If anyone is going to be there, send me a Tweet or an email and hopefully we can meet up there, and there are going to be quite a few of us from UCStrategies who will be there, as well.

Marty Parker: I will just comment on Lotusphere. It is the granddaddy of shows. IBM Lotus, actually before IBM even bought Lotus - they were filling the Dolphin and Swan venue there with thousands of their customers, so it's not the classic open registration, anyone can buy a ticket, and attend like Enterprise Connect or Interop, but as a community of customers, it is a pretty impressive show and a broad range of vendors in a significant exhibit space showing all the different things they offer to go with the Lotus Suite, to go with the Domino Suite...some of the applications built into that, add-ons to Lotus SameTime, Lotus Connections, IBM Quickr and other tools show up prominently at that show. So it has a lot of UC flavor to it I would say, wouldn't you?

Blair Pleasant: Oh, absolutely.

Don Van Doren: Yeah, this is Don. Let me just add - the other thing I think for attendees is the really deep dives that they get into - very strong technical sessions that really help people understand how to configure their systems to work within a particular environment or for a particular application.

Blair Pleasant: And it is also nice to talk with the IBM customers or the Lotus customers, because sometimes we don't hear that much about IBM in the UC world as much as we should, but then when you go to Lotusphere and you talk to their customers - they are passionate, they love this stuff. So it is a really nice perspective to talk to the customers and get their insights.

Jim Burton: One of my takeaways when I attend Lotusphere, and there is going to be a good half a dozen of us from the UCStrategies team that will be there this year, which is gratifying. I know they have reached out to Dave Michels to join, as well as Michael Finneran, so in addition to those who have been going for several years, we have a few new UCStrategies members who will be joining. But the thing that always strikes me is that it is very clear that part of IBM's strategy is they are open. They do not particularly care that they are working on top of a Microsoft environment or an Exchange environment. They want to get their piece of the puzzle and they have some components that they can add to almost any of these environments. So it always strikes me how they push so hard to show their openness and they deliver that openness, so I am exciting about being there.

Why don't we move on to the next show, which will be the latter part of next week down in Miami. So a group of us will be moving from Orlando down to Miami for IT Expo and David Yedwab, why don't you take over and give us some background on that one.

David Yedwab: Sure, thank you Jim. TMC Corporation will be hosting and sponsoring-I believe it's its 20-something edition of IT Expo. It's a show that's held semi-annually in the fall in Los Angeles and in what is really turning out to be a really cold winter here in the Northeast, next week in Miami. IT Expo, as it's name says, is the "IT" Expo of speaking not only about UC and internet telephony, but the show this year has 13 co-located events ranging from topics like 4G, super WiFi, SIP, and UC, where by the way I will be doing a keynote luncheon about SIP, UC, and service providers, sharing some information from several of our UC colleagues. There will also be a co-located event around business video, machine-to-machine communications, Asterisk will be holding Asterisk World. There will be a cloud summit, peering, start-ups, activities for the channel, and much, much more. Just about anything in the IT universe will be discussed in some size, shape, or form and as I understand it from some of the communications from TMC, I guess the economy is really improving. Of course, they are saying that attendance, both total and paid attendance is up over 50% this year, from last year. So I am looking forward to a rather exciting week, especially doing a session on interoperability, which I will be repeating with Marty Parker at Enterprise Connect later in the year. So thank you very much and Dave Michels, do you want to chip in about some of the other activities IT Expo?

Dave Michels: One of the things that is interesting about IT Expo is they have a number of concurrent shows taking place in the same venue. There are usually about five or six different shows running at the same time. This year, I will be co-hosting the Cloud Summit with Thomas Howe. Thomas has put on the Cloud Summit for the last several years and it has been one of the well-attended events at IT Expo, where it is basically just two days of nothing but deep dives and discussions and panels on various cloud topics and I am pretty excited to be part of it this year. A couple of the sessions that I will point out - there is going to be one on mobile clouds, where the cloud and mobile intersect, and we have companies like Mitel, who are doing their own MVNO and some pretty impressive Blackberry integration and moving into a hosted services model. The president of Cbeyond Cloud Services, Brooks Robinson, will be there. We have Bill Wright from VMware talking about virtualizing environments with cell phones and that is going to be a great session. We've also got another one on dark clouds, focusing on security with Dan York and a couple others, as well as another one on the channel, focusing exclusively just exactly how the cloud is changing the channel. We have Skype involved in that one, again Cbeyond is involved in that one, as well; Digium will be involved in that one as well. So there is some really good content in the Cloud Summit. I don't think Jon Arnold is on the phone right now, but Jon will be putting together his repeat performance at his Smart Grid Summit, which is an amazingly content-heavy event on how telecommunications and smart grids are coming together.

Jim Burton: Thanks Dave. Michael, why don't you talk a little bit about the special track that the UCStrategies team is helping put together and most of us will be participating that will be at the conference.

Michael Finneran: Well, for the first time this year TMC has invited a bunch of us to speak on UC. Marty unfortunately, will not be able to join us, but there will be a panel with, I think it's about five members of the UCStrategies Team. I know Blair is doing a session on her own. I am doing one on integrating mobility and UC, one of my favorite topics. They do seem to be covering the waterfront there.

Jim Burton: Great. We will move on to Enterprise Connect, which is a conference that the UCStrategies team has helped put together with the people that were originally VoiceCon. We worked with them from the very beginning. Marty, would you like to give us a little more background?

Marty Parker: It's going to be a very interesting Enterprise Connect. First of course, they have a new name, but secondly there are many vectors coming together. Dave Michels touched on a couple of them, cloud being one of those vectors that is going to feature prominently. Because the audience is primarily large enterprise telephony management and technical management, and there will continue to be emphasis there on IP telephony, SIP, and SIP trunking, and that sort of thing, but the real top level theme for this entire conference is going to be unified communications, because it really consumes all those different elements. You may use IP telephony in a UC application. You may use video and collaboration in a UC application - those kinds of topics and UC of course, is increasingly showing up in the cloud.

So it is really going to be the glue as Jim said, we, the UCStrategies Team have been sponsoring and moderating that with Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for about four and a half years now. So it will be exciting to see this one. I expect that the attendance will be even stronger and will be very solid. We have about five or six different specific tracks - one that is going to great that I will be moderating is comparing UC options-who is offering what? That's always exciting. We have twelve different vendors who will be reviewed and they will be on a panel interacting with us, as we review their products. The opening session is 9:00 a.m. on Monday, called, "Implementation Options for Unified Communications," and that is going to be one where we talk specifically about how unified communications gets deployed. In other words, what are the different ways that people deploy unified communications? We will have a vendor response panel on that, not a vendor-by-vendor review, but rather a vendor respondent panel, with Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, and Siemens.

Later in the week, David Yedwab and I have a UC Interoperability Forum going, as he said. And then we also will see Jim Burton hosting "what's going on in the UC community?" - a summit on that topic, what's going on in UC, missed realities and what comes next, and Blair Pleasant will talk about the UC market updates. So we will have a nice, rich program on UC. It will be interesting because the keynotes for this Enterprise Connect -- formerly Voicecom -- the keynotes are actually somewhat predictable except somewhat surprising. Cisco and Avaya will both be there, Barry O'Sullivan of Cisco and Kevin Kennedy of Avaya, but David Gurlé, general manager and VP of Skype Enterprise will be a keynote following Cisco and Avaya on Tuesday morning. And on Wednesday, Gurdeep Singh Pall will reappear. He has been presenting the Microsoft story to VoiceCon-Enterprise Connect for about two and a half to three years now, very consistent progress that he and his team have been making and he likes to come and present it. Following him will be Hewlett Packard, with their Technology Consulting Services, so a Technology Services Consultant, they call it. So you will see some new names on the keynote roster at Enterprise Connect this year.

Dave Michels: I wanted to mention something we're trying new at Enterprise Connect. We are not even sure if it is going to work yet; we have talked about a lot of these other shows that are doing launch pad events, and we wanted to do some sort of launch pad, but Enterprise Connect is so enterprise-focused. So we are launching this year, it's called "Innovation Showcase;" we're looking for young companies that have some innovative ideas targeted at the enterprise. One of the requirements for these companies is that they have to have at least one paying enterprise customer already to qualify, and they are going to be judged before the show, based on the innovations that they deliver. Then we will put four of them up on stage between keynotes, so they can do a pitch to an enterprise audience about the thing that they are offering. It's brand new and we have no idea if we are going to have a hundred applicants or zero, and we are trying to get the word out. But we are pretty excited about the opportunity and if there are any young companies out there targeting the enterprise with a communication solution, they should definitely be looking into the Innovation Showcase.

Jim Burton: Great, anything else on Enterprise Connect?

Michael Finneran: Of course, we are going to have a mobility track again this time around, and covering out a lot more talk on the devices, mobile echo systems, mobile management. We have a session that we are introducing for the first time on tablets and tablet applications, as well as a general stage summit, which will feature at least one of the mobile operators. So this year for the first time, we are getting Verizon and Sprint more actively involved, and we are certainly interested to hear from Verizon, now that they have an iPhone of their own.

Jim Burton: Very good. Well, the next conference is the UC Summit, hosted by UCStrategies and we expect this to be better than last year. We always look for improvement year after year. One of the things that we are doing a little bit differently this year, rather than having the keynote speakers, who are platinum sponsors, get up and kind of give a sales pitch about what they are doing and where they are going, we have asked them to each give vision statements about where their market or where their product strategy is headed, a specific component of their product so that we can get a better understanding from these major vendors about what they view is happening in the area of video conferencing, in hosted services, and cloud computing. We are looking for a variety of those types of things. We know that this year we are going to have a much better turnout from the representatives from the various channel partners who will be attending. Last year, for those of you who participate, you will remember that we had a lot of conflicts last year. Interop and Cisco's major partner conference happened at the same time. So we worked hard to make sure that we didn't have that conflict, so we expect to have a lot of the really top end enterprise resellers participating in the conference this year. Anybody else want to jump in?

Marty Parker: Well I would say, Jim, that the important thing with the UC Summit is that it brings a different community together. It is not focused on customers, it is focused on bringing the channel - the value added resellers and the consultant community - together with the vendors. Basically, the people who create the solutions for the customer having a conversation about how those solutions are proceeding. I think the trends that we have talked about already here in mobility and cloud, and some of the transformations that are occurring are going to be very prominent at this year's UC Summit. And it will be a really valuable conference for those who attend.

Jim Burton: Thank you, Marty and while I've got you, the last conference of the conference season is Interop and you play a major role in that.

Marty Parker: Coming up May 8-12, Interop is in Las Vegas this year. Lenny Heymann, the conference chair, approached me recently and said, "We want UC put back more prominently into the program this year." In past years, they've had an all-day Unified Communications Workshop and sure enough, they put that back on the program, Sunday, May 8. So I will be there, and will probably bring a few of my close UCStrategies buddies with me and we will be providing an all-day as Lenny calls it, a "Make It So," kind of a Star Trek theme, "Make It So: Tools for Successful Planning, selection, Implementation of Unified Communication Within the Enterprise." There are about a half a dozen other sessions that will show up on Tuesday and Wednesday in Las Vegas, so like I say, UC is post-recession I would say coming back into the foreground on the Interop agenda.

Jim Burton: Great. Thank you everybody. That is the list of conferences and of course, we will be reporting back on each one of them after they happen. So we look forward to doing that, and we will probably miss next week because we of course, will be right in the middle of conference season. So we will talk to you all again in two weeks.