Enterprise Connect 2018 – First Impressions, Literally

I often write recaps of industry events, and I have first impressions to share for Enterprise Connect in two regards. First, I’m getting my thoughts organized while they’re fresh and the buzz is still strong, but also because this was my first time attending the event. Most of my BCStrategies colleagues have been going for years, so I’m seeing Enterprise Connect with fresh eyes.

On that front, I want to first thank Eric Krapf, Beth Schultz, Michelle Burbick and all their support teams for putting on such a sold event. I’ve worn all the hats in the conference business, so I know what it takes to make this such a well-oiled machine. Ironically, being a tech conference, the WiFi was pretty deficient, and let’s hope that gets fixed, but otherwise, it checked all the boxes for me.

As with any big show, there’s an impossible balance to strike between three competing needs – seeing the sessions, walking the show floor, and managing an ever-shifting schedule of briefings and business meetings. I managed to cover all this pretty well, but it takes a lot of planning, so in the spirit of all the hype around AI, maybe the UBM folks will come up with a chatbot that will help cover some of that ground next year.

Am thinking something along these lines – while the content is available for attendees to review after the fact, how about a bot that captures highlights of sessions that I specify in advance with keywords I’m looking for, then updates me in near real-time? Perhaps a more targeted way of tracking things beyond the twitter feed, but I’m sure you get the gist. I’d love to spend more time networking, but you can only be in one place at a time.

This idea may be a bit out there, but it reflects a reality that seemed well-grounded at Enterprise Connect, namely the need to have a clearly defined use case. We’re saturated in AI hype, but the potential is too good to ignore, and it’s very easy to get caught up in the technology. That was certainly the central message of my tutorial on speech technology, with the subtext being to be careful what you wish for. My tutorial was the very first time slot of the conference, and it was good to see many of my themes reiterated over the next few days. With that said, here are two sets of broad takeaways and messages that resonated for me.

1. The disruptors are disrupting – they’re the “new voices”

I’m sure the enterprise IT attendees must be wondering who is really driving the collaboration space. Microsoft probably made the strongest impression overall with their vision for Teams, but those outside the conventional collaboration fold are getting a lot of attention. The stage presence for both Google and Slack were underwhelming, but that was countered by the big splash Twilio made with their Flex launch. Amazon and Facebook showed why they belong, and overall, these players are what I call the “new voices” in collaboration.

Not surprisingly, the collaboration space is getting crowded, and the barriers to entry are getting higher. Of course, enterprises tend to buy from larger vendors, but cloud is becoming the real differentiator. As the business world moves more to metrics-based decision-making, the more valuable data becomes, and that plays into the hands of these disruptors. We’re well past the time where hardware ruled, and what’s really going to drive success is partnering with companies that can leverage the scale and economics of the cloud, along with an ability to gather, manage and interpret data in ways that businesses need. That doesn’t bode well for start-ups and smaller vendors, and the collaboration value proposition could become badly diluted if the vendors focus too much on communications and not enough on business outcomes.

Perhaps an omen, but I didn’t come across anyone at the conference who shares my view that the term “team collaboration” is a ridiculous oxymoron, and is in fact, part of the problem in getting the market to see the business value. That said, I found RingCentral’s Richard Townhill to at least be like-minded by noting during a panel that “it’s only at conferences like this that we say ‘collaboration.’” Correct – workers don’t think in terms like this, and marketing-savvy disruptors like AWS and Facebook won’t make these mistakes as they land and expand into the enterprise.

2.  Enterprise Disconnect?

The vendors were doing most of the talking on stage and on the show floor, but the buyers aren’t moving so fast, and a case could be made to rename the conference Enterprise Disconnect. I was not alone in cautioning about the present-day limits of AI and chatbots, and hopefully attendees came away with a reasonable sense of reality. On the darker side, I absolutely believe that in time, enterprises will push hard for the promised benefits of automation, but with that comes the slippery slope of Big Brother where privacy is sacrificed for the greater good, and collaboration becomes reduced to groupthink. That’s a longer conversation for another time.

Whether the likes of Alexa for Business will pop up like mushrooms to make our workday more productive remains to be seen, but it was good to hear talk in the sessions about the need to give employees the tools they need, but also give IT some semblance of control. This is a really important balance to strike, and with the cloud making these applications so accessible to anyone, it’s not surprising to see enterprises wanting to walk before running.

Related to that, there was a clear sense that email isn’t going anywhere, and that IT will have to support multiple platforms to keep everyone happy. As good as the likes of Teams and Spark can be, the workplace has too much variance in both generational values and comfort level with technology to have everyone using the same platform for all modes of communicating and collaborating. This only makes IT’s job harder, especially for those still rooted in the legacy world – which is just about everyone.

Furthermore, during the course of my conversations, I continued hearing how entrenched PBXs remain, and how vendors are still shipping systems and IP phones in record numbers. This reality just doesn’t add up when talking to Millennials, so enterprises still have some parallel universes to manage. Optimism aside, the future hasn’t quite arrived yet, so much of the messaging from Enterprise Connect needs to be taken with a grain of salt.