Software-defined network is considered by many to be one of the most important, and potentially disruptive, developments in networking since the rise of the Internet. To date, networks and connectivity have come first, and applications have followed. SDN turns this model on its head, approaching networking from an apps-first standpoint. In this SDN pre conference at ITEXPO Miami, we will define SDN, look at the technologies and components involved in SDN, the use cases of SDN, the players involved in moving SDN forward, and what this all means for networking as we know it.

Clear, reliable and high-quality communication between the customer and the call center representative is of utmost importance when it comes to user experience in the contact center, but it is only part of the story. The reality is that there are countless variations on the UC theme that can make it challenging to bring true service assurance to the contact center environment. When it comes to user experience in the call center, IT organizations must look at the entire process holistically and take into account all of the infrastructure, applications and services that enable the representative to serve the customer satisfactorily. The service delivery of these functions and parts is what makes up the entire contact center user experience for both the employee and the customer. This session will discuss how IT organizations can create a truly unified contact center environment, including integration of emerging channels with traditional call center technologies, to create an optimal environment for providing exceptional customer service.

As the migration from traditional to IP-based communications services continues – and we are now well past the early adopter phase, with businesses every day realizing their existing infrastructure alone will leave them trailing their more agile competitors. The session border controller has become a key component of the enterprise migration strategy, helping support the migration to Unified Communications without abandoning existing technology investments. Enterprises that have embraced SBCs have shown they can securely extend communications to external parties, unlocking new ways of collaborating with clients, partners, distributed employees and the supply chain. This session will continue the conversation around the need for SBCs in at the enterprise network edge for security and privacy requirements, signaling and traffic encryption, media and signaling forking, network demarcation, and threat detection and mitigation, and interoperability, enabling enterprises to capture the cost benefits of VoIP and UC, while maintaining essential security postures and access to multi-mobile communications across the network, anytime, anywhere.

With the rising sales of mobile devices, both enterprises and SMBs are seeing a surge in the BYOD trend. Businesses are supporting mobile devices, allowing employees the freedom to communicate from any device and work from anywhere. This session will explore what businesses need to consider before implementing a BYOD strategy and how it can help deliver a true competitive edge. Topics include: IT strategies for supporting personal devices, security concerns, enhancing productivity, UC flexibility, cost savings, and more.

A 2012 IDC study reports that approximately 40 percent of enterprises have adopted unified communications (UC) and collaboration systems, while another 35 percent are planning to deploy the technology within the next two years. The remaining organizations are still testing and evaluating different systems to establish if unified communications is right for them. With strong enterprise enthusiasm for UC, there are still challenges associated with implementation and configuration – challenges that, if addressed, could significantly accelerate customer deployment of hosted unified communications services. As enterprises transition away from legacy voice systems, service providers are employing innovative technologies and processes to speed deployment of hosted UC, reduce complexities associated with the migration, and, most importantly, get enterprises up and running to experience the benefits of UC services more quickly. This session will cover strategies and tools for service providers to accelerate configuration and deployment of hosted UC, and the benefits of doing so, as well as how the accommodate the latest trends, including BYOD.

Cloud technology is great, no doubt, as it offers several benefits, including reduced or no hardware costs, aggregated computing power at an affordable cost, near-instant scalability in either direction, deployment flexibility, and more. But is it truly the solution to all your communications and network problems? How much do you know about your cloud provider and its infrastructure and policies? Is it a hosted offering under a cloud veil? Does it truly offer you the benefits of cloud computing? How much is within your sphere of control? What do you know about their security policies and access control infrastructure? Should you consider migrating some of your applications to the cloud, while continuing to host others internally? Which ones are best suited for a cloud environment, and which are you unwilling to move from your internal data center?

The explosive growth of mobile devices in consumer and enterprise environments has created new opportunities and significant demand for mobile access to applications and services, but developing for this fragmented and rapidly changing landscape brings with it significant challenges. Companies need a secure and scalable approach to mobile development that delivers compelling capabilities and experiences, while maximizing existing investments in skills and infrastructure. This session will cover the methods for securely building, running, and managing mobile applications, including the supporting back-end infrastructure and available mobile platforms and frameworks, like HTML5, Dojo Mobile, hybrid, and native application development. A closer look at the interplay between application security, user security and device security to deliver a safe mobile computing environment will be highlighted.

The federation of communication services like presence, messaging, voice, video and applications across heterogeneous UC platforms and networks will enable seamless collaboration between enterprise users and their partners. As the supply chains of large enterprises get more tightly coupled, a federated environment will deliver productivity and cost savings by better collaboration and enhanced decision making. This session addresses the challenges from existing solutions, need for federation as well as the business case. - What are the challenges in current UC market? - What is the need for Federation – the problem statement, and how it can be achieved? - How challenging will Federation deployment be? - What is the business case for a federation deployment? - What are the benefits for UC - How will proprietary UC platform vendors adapt to federation requirement? - Use Cases for deployment and example of a service provider using federation

The evolution of identity services has become a major source of concern for many, including the executives and new shareholders of Facebook. Why? Because Facebook’s business model is built around the sharing of personal data with third parties that target users for advertising. Now that the business model is open for worldwide scrutiny and analysis, the fears that users have about sharing their identity information will only intensify. In this new “Identity Economy,” identity data is the currency and lies at the heart of online commerce – from enabling transactions via authentication and authorization to being the subject of transactions. Companies that fail to participate in the Identity Economy will lose market share to more adept competitors willing to leverage identity data to capture new customers and offer better experiences for returning customers. This session will discuss how companies will need to evolve and adopt a different approach to harness the power and value of identity data – and the sharing of that data – with the ultimate goal of allowing users to have greater control over the content they give and receive. This will enhance the user experience and boost the bottom lines. This is a fundamental principle of the Identity Economy. Privacy, security and identity issues have been at the forefront of the news in recent years, and there is a great deal of concern among American consumers about personal information and identity threats.

Network convergence, the efficient coexistence of telephone, video and data communication within a single network, is no longer innovative but required in enterprise organizations today. Applications, such as collaboration tools and VoIP, have become more prevalent in the enterprise and managing Quality of Service (QoS) on these applications is becoming increasingly important to ensuring businesses operate at maximum efficiency and productivity. Indeed, QoS has become what separates the good network from the great – and the user, QoS is the only thing that matters. This session will consider the network requirements for ensuring your enterprise network is prepared to deliver UC and collaboration services and applications to your users.

The rise of tablets has changed the modern workplace. IT departments are challenged to support application management and development, while creating scalable infrastructures. How will organizations solve this issue? It isn’t as simple as taking employee machines and making them secure for the workplace. Early adopters that are quick to capitalize on disruptive technologies will lead – including the creation of “Bring Your Own Device” policies along with cloud services to support complex enterprise application environments. Enterprises are eager to move complex application workloads into the cloud but what are the tools needed to manage and deliver enterprise apps while maintaining the balance to control end-user devices? In this session, participants will discover what’s driving companies to adopt enterprise app stores, and compare approaches to manage mobile apps that are innovating the way businesses mobilize.

With business constantly looking for ways to reduce CAPEX, the challenge for providers becomes finding other revenue opportunities. The evolution of cloud computing and the emergence of the Anything as a Service world, the potential for recurring revenue streams increases dramatically, as businesses still require not only enterprise-class services, but also the support and management functions that go along. This session will consider the cloud and managed service model, why it has become so attractive to both providers and businesses, and best practices for selling and delivering them.

One of the biggest problems for enterprises today is the large volume of customer calls. High operating costs prevent human interaction for every phone call, yet research continues to show that customers prefer to speak with a person, not a robot. Siri has raised the bar when it comes to automated interactions. This session will focus on new technology that allows for increasing customer satisfaction by personalizing automated voice interactions, making them more conversational than robotic. The result – tailored automated responses that bring back human interaction.

There is a misconception that, because of the precipitous increase in mobile device usage, users are comfortable with the sub-par quality of current voice service quality. What may be correct is that users don’t really think that they have a choice, and/or are not familiar with the options and the state of the art. There is an emerging trend in both mobile and fixed services called HD Voice. Anyone who has experienced an HD voice call is simply astonished. So what’s inhibiting its adoption and use? What are the performance levels offered today by OTT services? Are these the limits of voice quality? What is the outlook – quo vadis VoIP? This session will discuss current trends in voice quality, why better voice quality is a business benefit and not a nice-to-have, and why adoption of higher performance levels will increase significantly in the next years.

The BYOD trend is increasing for many reasons, most notably because of the increasing attractiveness, in form and function, of the various mobile devices on the market today and the increasing use of those devices to access services on the Internet. In fact, most people already are using multiple mobile devices in their personal environments to access email, social networks, or various other applications that are meant to make our lives easier. So why then would we want, or need to use another company-issued device to accomplish essentially the same tasks for work? Logical response is to leverage user identity as they move between network environments – switching an identity is much easier and more palatable than switching devices or applications. Given that the idea of leveraging one’s own identity for work purposes has been around for some time, why is this not more commonplace today? Why do we not see more companies serving in the role of an Identity Provider (IdP)? This session will consider the opportunity for both enterprises and service providers in an identity-based mobile world, where identity systems can be implemented to determine access levels for various applications and resources, and the potential for growth of identity ecosystems.

What a difference the past decade made to CSPs! IP technology has brought about changes few could have imagined at the turn of the century. Gone are the high barriers to entry, exchanged for brutal competitiveness. Gone are telecom silos, replaced by creativity. As margins on voice and messaging are under attack, CSPs are looking for the next cash cow. The field is reminiscent of the 3-way cage match between Telcos, Cable MSOs, and non-traditional competitors, with the winner taking the crown. What are the key ingredients the players need to look at to succeed in this ever more competitive market? The session examines the changing market and strategy options open for the remaining players, common missteps and less visible, yet key ingredients to success.

Challenging economic times and the commoditization of products and services have caused businesses to rely on customer experience as a differentiator. For many companies, providing good customer service is the cornerstone of their customer experience strategy. More than two thirds of recently surveyed companies say that good customer service technologies play a high or very high role in their overall customer experience strategy. This report reveals that focusing on an improved customer experience is a top goal of many organizations, as it correlates to increased customer loyalty, lifetime spending and positive referrals.

Cloud adoption can be boiled down to two motivations: business agility and cost. Both are equally legitimate, but both also are likely to struggle when the question of ROI arises… and it will. Indeed, the financial benefits of cloud computing aren’t always as apparent as they might seem at the surface, especially when considering the various alternatives available, including hybrid solutions. This session will discuss how IT executives are rationalizing cloud investments by discovering what it costs to deliver a service internally versus migrating to the cloud, how they are making those decisions, what strategies are working for gaining C-level buy-in, and what questions they are asking as they determine which cloud model is best for their business.

Corporate employees are not just looking for the ability to work from anywhere but, increasingly, they’re expecting it. As a result IT departments are being pushed to provide access and consistent work experiences for employees across the organization regardless of device and location. The challenge for them is that they can’t lose sight of the security, compliance, and redundancy needs of the corporation as a whole. To date the focus has been on the corporate infrastructure or very specific corporate applications. But, cloud computing has provided corporate IT departments with new options that lend themselves to a more flexible IT environment while still protecting the organization. This session will examine how VDI and Desktop as a Service options are driving a more flexible mobile workforce.

Owning the billing relationship, or as much of the total communications spend of a customer as possible, is every service providers ultimate goal and major challenge. With things like the integration of WiFi hotspots and enhanced mobility becoming important parts of the mix for mobile operators, fixed landline and mobile providers, cable TV companies and social media companies like Google and Facebook, the issue of who can/will own the customer, the experience as well as the greatest part of the value-added billing relationship, has never been more important or problematic. Attend this session to learn what leading service providers are doing to extend their abilities to provide an end-to-end quality user experience regardless of access end point and connection to enhance their brands, decrease churn and increase loyalty and profits.

As the market demand for virtual assistants/agents market heats up – thanks to “people” like Nuance’s Nina, Apple’s Siri, and Google Now – the race is on to develop the most innovative mobile virtual agents. However, while mobile is a hot new channel, it is just one of the many channels in which consumers interact with businesses. In fact, based on recent research, almost 50 percent of smartphone users access mobile apps 10+ times a day; 73 percent use mobile apps to assist or make a mobile purchase; and 78 percent use them for customer service. Yet 50 percent of applications are abandoned because they don’t facilitate self-service, are not easy to use, and don’t integrate with a live agent. To that end, successful mobile agents must have the ability to integrate with Web, social media, CRM systems and live chat support for a consistent, engaging experience across all channels. After all, consumers don’t view their interactions with a company based on their access point – they just want a consistent experience. This session will cover the virtual agent/assistant market landscape; why integration with other channels is critical to mobile virtual agent success; and the innovative mobile-based applications we can expect to see in the near future, including personal virtual shopping agents, virtual insurance agents, and virtual bank tellers.

Application Performance Management is gathering momentum in the industry, in light of its effectiveness in ferreting out performance problems for Web applications and narrowing down bottlenecks in the IT infrastructure. Most implementations look at network traffic, identify transactions, classify application traffic, measure resource utilization, identify where the delays are. So, how do UC apps play into this scenario? UC applications are IT apps, incorporating real-time communications like VoIP, video communications, Telepresence, IM/Presence, and Unified Messaging. Do traditional APM implementations work for these apps? How can your IT team monitor service availability of an end-user’s softphone using traditional APM implementations? What about a ring-no-answer on Unified Messaging? Will a misconfiguration in the routing table in the call management application resulting in poor end user experience be detected? Traditional definitions of APM are sound, but implementations need to adapt to current technologies and extended to provide truly end-to-end monitoring of service availability and performance of UC and real-time communications. That is especially true in cloud implementations.

World-at-Work estimates that about 44 million people work at home at least once a year. Research from IDC estimates that by 2013 there will be 10 million telecommuters in the U.S. With more business being done from home or remote sites, IT departments are experiencing “Communications Madness” as they try to manage and secure endpoints on the move. For a manager with a mobile workforce, it is challenging to track remote employees. Besides monitoring productivity, managers also deal with issues for remote workers such as network security, data transmission issues, remote support and variance in local broadband service. However, remote workers can function and be managed as effectively as workers at HQ if they are given the right tools for success. This session will explore how to develop the right mobility action plan, including a holistic security strategy – for both IT managers and users – that leverages day-to-day management strategies with the most powerful mobile collaboration tools, leaving the team to focus on more strategic business initiatives.

Competition is nothing new to the technology arena – it’s what breeds innovation and defines new trends. When new ideas reach the point of becoming disruptive, competition heats up to the point of a tech war, which is where cloud computing has taken the industry, with vendors large and small making a play in the clouds, and businesses of all sizes evaluating their options in the cloud. The idea that any computing and communications resources will be delivered on an “as-a-Service” basis from server farms physically located anywhere in the world represents a powerful shift in computing theory. Despite the hype, media attention, and adoption to date, the cloud is still a relatively new technology with many questions still to be answered. Still, the concept of moving sensitive business information and applications into an off-premises environment managed by a third party is profoundly changing how businesses think about, purchase, and manage technology. What does that change mean? How will providers and users alike handle concerns over privacy and security? Which cloud model will dominate the others? Where does open source fit into the picture? Does cloud mean the end of local computing completely? The only thing that is certain about the future of the cloud is the battle for supremacy will be fierce. TMC’s Editorial Director Erik Linask will lead a panel of cloud computing leaders to find out what it will dominate the cloud landscape and what the next major shift will be, and who will emerge victorious in this battle.

No matter the information communications technology sector (ICT), 2013 is shaping up as a tipping point where long term success or failuare is likely to be determined. A “new normal” is emerging that is characterized by one constant, ACCELERATING CHANGE. Adapt and prosper, ignore and probably perish.

You have questions, and ITEXPO is the place to get answers and context for how to understand industry trends and align your thinking and business for what will be a year of enormous challenges and opportunities.

Join (Rich Tehrani, Carl Ford, Erik Linsk and Phil Edholm) for a lively interactive sessions that covers what you would like to know about: BYOD, ubiquitous mobility, “Big Data,” the impact of the cloud and data center transformation, the focus on improving customer experiences and business process optimization, and what to think about regarding risk management, security and how new technologies like WebRTC, pervasive and inexpensive video, and the growth of HTML5 will transform the nature of professional and person computing and communications.

In a data-driven world, what will be the role of the network operators? Will they be “dumb pipe” companies, or will they leverage their unique assets —communications infrastructure, connectivity, market coverage and customer intimacy — to emerge as the hubs of dynamic global ecosystems? Rhetoric on this subject has been replaced with reality. New capabilities and services are being developed and delivered to customers in multiple form factors on multiple screens, and developments like virtualization, WebRTC, and CDNs further threaten the value of the network operator as a traditional service provider. The coming months will require an strategy decision on the part of network owners: Will they cede the high value-added ground to others or succeed in asserting the imperative of their centrality to creating the future. TMC Senior Editor and 35-year veteran of the telecom industry Peter Bernstein will lead this critical discussion with a panel of high-profile vendors with a critical stake to claim in the new service delivery paradigm.

The CRM industry is built upon the premise that businesses have ongoing relationships with their customers. But do the people on the other end really want to have a relationship with that business? Does a website visit, contest entry or even purchase mean the customer wants a long-term relationship? Do they want a lifetime of newsletters, e-mails, calls and text messages from that business just because they had a first date? Some do, others don’t. Businesses have a unique opportunity to have real relationships with their customers, it’s not hard to find your biggest enthusiasts. We live in a relationship driven world, where people are happy to show you their enthusiasm with a like, +1, share or good old fashioned comment. Just take a look in your customer support queue, Twitter stream, Facebook and Google shares and likes. Check the reviews in local search pages. Monitor mobile check-ins. The list goes on and on in the ways people are telling you that they are interested in taking the relationship to the next level. These are the people you should spend your energy learning more about, reaching out to and sending an e-mail to (and use their first name because you remember it, not because the software does). These are the people you have a relationship with. These are the people you should be concentrating on. This session is all about finding those special customers and turning them into your champions of growth.

Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth estimates that a high-end user’s Internet bandwidth will grow by 50% per year and fits data beginning in 1983. This is only 10% slower than Moore’s Law projects their processing power will increase. By now, we have seen all sorts of models predicting that we couldn't maintain these growth curves, each dashed by the discovery of that next technical advance that keeps us moving right along on target. So, now we find ourselves asking the question, “Will anyone really need the incredible wireless bandwidth that is on the way?” In short, is there really a need for 4G and beyond? This session will explore the societal transformations that extreme computing in your palm will present to peoples around the globe.

VoIP, cloud, video, UC… all are at the early stages of an incredible surge in demand. It’s no longer about if or when, but about gaining revenue and market share now, as enterprises begin mass migrations to new cloud services from a wide array of new vendors, blurring once well-established lines between vendors and services. White papers, analyst reports and journalists all provide valuable information – but what’s as valuable as real life lessons learned? Wouldn’t it be great to know what products and services are most in demand, what sales approaches are working, and what the current “in the trenches” challenges are? This session will uncover responses top these questions and many more from service providers across the globe, helping you nail down proven revenue streams.

So you’ve decided social media should be part of your customer service strategy. Smart move. And you’ve started listening to some of the conversations taking place about you, and realize there you need a solid strategy for social response. How do you determine which interactions merit response? How do you determine the appropriate response? Which channels are most appropriate for response and when should you escalate to alternative channels? Who should respond? What technology do you need to respond appropriately and track the interactions? This session will cover best practices for providing customer service through social channels so your teams are prepared to interact with your customers on a level playing field.

Filled with the most up-to-date information on unified communications and collaboration, this session will focus on the UCC market, the players, the challenges, and the future. This session will clear up many of the misunderstandings about unified communications, provide market forecasts, the key trends and drivers, and an overview of the various vendor offerings, and discuss what’s in store for the near future.

With the explosive growth of the mobile app market, businesses are increasingly leveraging mobile apps in multiple ways to communicate with their customers. Thanks to Nina, Siri, and other similar voice apps, voice-enablement has become the next great playing field in an increasingly competitive mobile environment. This new functionality affords users the ability to utilize apps in additional settings, or to use voice functionality to simplify tasks. Why is voice-enablement coming into such focus? Simply, the user experience is vastly improved, and when customers are happy, businesses are happy. This session will consider the benefits and voice-enabling mobile applications and strategies for implementation.

Server virtualization presents many challenges when it comes to networking and securing your application environment. There is a rapidly evolving trend in the industry to virtualize the network using overlay techniques along with OpenFlow and new generation SDN controllers. Despite the attention SDN and OpenFlow have received, there is still confusion around with SDN seeks achieve and what its benefits are. This session will discuss the network virtualization trends and the networking challenges being faced, including the latest technologies and protocols, designed to build overlay networks that can overcome the limitation of current IP networking designs. We will discuss the need for a complete end-to-end coordinated virtual architecture enabling applications and the network to collaborate in providing a high quality experience for users and enabling optimization of resource consumption.

Customers have new communications tools at their disposal, which they are able to leverage to contact you or their own personal communities. Why shouldn’t your business be able to respond to customers with the communication tools that deliver the best possible customer service experience? Unified communications, and more recently social software, have become mainstream business communications technologies, but their use often falls short in the customer service environment. This session will show how both UC and social software can be leveraged to optimize your customers’ experiences when they reach out to your organization for assistance, or when it’s necessary or appropriate to reach out to them. The session will focus on specific use cases for bringing the power of UC and social software to the customer service environment.

Cisco has predicted that 90 percent of all Internet traffic will be video by 2014. If that figure is anywhere near accurate, video is on the verge of a significant increase in usage in the coming year. While much of this traffic will be attributed to individually made content uploaded to YouTube, increasing amounts will be generated by businesses. But not all business-generated video content will be forward facing. In fact, much of the video content in many businesses companies is for internal use, whether it be for training, communications or knowledge sharing. This session will discuss why business use of video will increase significantly, various ways enterprise users can leverage video content both internally and externally, and resources available for organization, storage, management and distribution of rich media content.

The mobile market is forging ahead, but the much-touted mobile UC offerings languish. At face value it would seem that mobile workers would benefit greatly from, presence, integrated communications and collaboration capabilities, yet they bypass the mobile UC offerings and prefer native UC-like capabilities that come packaged with smartphones. The growth rate in the tablet market is growing by leaps and bounds, but as tablets lack a basic cellular voice capability can they serve as mobile UC devices or will they be yet another mobile opportunity the UC vendors miss out on? How can mobile operators collaborate with UC vendors to create enhanced value offerings? Can they deliver the kind of personalized, social experience to business users that consumers are enjoying in their personal lives?

Enthusiasm for small cells is rising, and some carriers have launched broad deployment strategies. Many, however, expect to wait as many as three years before adopting a small cell strategy. Why? While backhaul questions have largely been addressed, standards development remains an open issue. In order for small cells to provide the interference-free, optimized network connectivity that is expected, the industry must come to agreement on standards to support small cell development. This session will discuss the importance of small cells as a key element of the wireless landscape of the future, how small cell adoption can be accelerated, and what challenges still remain.

Enterprises and their contact centers are sitting on endless, useful data but not using it effectively – mainly because it’s unstructured and traditional analytic technology has been very complex making adoption hard. Instead of manually listening to each call that comes in, or deploying complicated solutions that utilize speech-to-text processes, call centers can now adopt a next-generation speech analytics approach where, without a single touch or prompt, a powerful phonetics engine automatically listens, analyzes and categorizes each phone transaction. This session will review new analytics techniques for the customer interactions and how they can be leveraged to increase customer satisfaction, retention and acquisition, service quality, and marketing success.

This session will introduce WebRTC, the latest technology to take the communications markets by storm. Most agree WebRTC will change the ways people can communicate and, perhaps more importantly, with whom. This session will discuss how and why WebRTC will change certain forms of communication and will put the WebRTC technology in context, drawing parallels between the changes the original Web brought in computing and what WebRTC will mean to communications and collaboration. It will discuss how WebRTC will impact enterprises in telecommunications and contact centers, telecommunications carrier and providers and transition communications from the PSTN to the Web. The session will conclude with specific examples of how WebRTC could change current vertical businesses.

Mobility and video conferencing are both key to a successful unified communications strategy, and the mobile video landscape is quickly heating up. The ability to deliver enterprise-grade video conferencing including HD audio, video and data-sharing on mobile devices is critical, especially among the next-generation workforce, which expects to use consumer products like iPhones and iPads within enterprise environments. This session will discuss the importance of video connectivity within UC platforms as well as how the worlds of mobility and video are quickly colliding.

Gartner recently stated: “Enterprises will have to come up with two mobile strategies – one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario.” As the mobile workforce communicates and collaborates with more devices and applications, and as consumers rely upon smartphones and tablets for work and play, end-users now expect a consistent experience for Unified Communications (UC) applications that spans all devices, operating systems and networks. The desire for a single UC experience is challenged by a lack of communications ‘portability’ that restricts the mobile enterprise from thriving. If an enterprise end-user is making a voice call on her iPhone, she cannot – in the middle of that call – seamlessly switch to a video chat on her Android tablet, or to an IM exchange on her laptop. The byproduct of being unable to integrate disparate mobile applications, platforms and devices is an enterprise with communications silos for voice, video, text and collaboration that inhibit workforce productivity and mobility. This session will detail how mobile network operators and service providers can rapidly and effectively deliver a dynamic and consistent user experience across devices, delivering on the full promise of the mobile enterprise and owning the customer experience, thus opening up new revenue opportunities and reducing churn.

Traditionally, your call center has been the focus of you customer service function. Times change. While the contact center is still likely the first point of contact, there are many other departments and individuals within your organization that have become part of the customer service value chain, thanks to unified communications. When implemented properly, today’s communications technologies allow the first line of customer service to call upon other groups to help optimize the customer experience, from sales to engineering to tech support to marketing… basically anyone within your organization. If you have mobile techs or support staff, this becomes even more of an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction by reducing callbacks. Attend this session to understand just how unified communications can unify your customer service, and how that will help grow your business.

Microsoft Lync has certainly been winning its share of the interest and has become one of the hottest discussion topics in enterprise UC. Why? What has the experience been to date, as enterprises have started to integrate Lync into their communications infrastructures? Is Microsoft taking over the UC market? Is Lync replacing the enterprise PBX? How can Lync co-exist with legacy solutions and cloud-based services? This session will include a discussion of how Lync can be deployed within your existing communications environment, the challenges businesses have faced with their Lync deployments, how they have overcome them, and how their Lync experiences compare to their expectations.

Businesses have tried countless methods for influencing customer behavior. The problem is, none of them have proven consistent in their results. Gamification – the theory of applying dame-design thinking to business activities and customer relationships – has become new and exciting way of engaging customers in manner to which they can relate. Whether it involves earning badges or points or other rewards that can be traded in for monetary equivalents. Among the most popular early forms of gamifications are airline loyalty programs, where customers accumulate frequest flyer miles for various purchases. Join this session to understand how the mobile explosion and social media have combined to reinvent gamification as a business strategy and loyalty mechanism.

They say smart people learn from their mistakes – but the smartest learn from the mistakes of others. Business continuity and disaster recovery aren’t new ideas, yet they frequently serve as a reminder of this theory. Each time we witness a natural disaster or other extended network and power outages, they are brought into the spotlight. In the devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought with her, many businesses across the Northeast were effectively immobilized due to a lack of proper BC/DR strategies. Even major media entities like Huffington Post and Gawker experiences outages due to outages in their New York data centers. These unfortunate incidents should serve as reminders for businesses to ensure they have the proper backup and contingency plans in place. In fact, BC/DR isn’t just a suggested safeguard, it’s a necessary ingredient for a successful business plan. This session will discuss past experiences – both successes and failures – in outage scenarios, and how your businesses can ensure its operational stability in any circumstance.

Social media has become the dominant communications medium for your customers, as they have self-defined it. Many businesses have started listening to these social conversations to understand what’s being said about them. Some have even implemented engagement campaigns to react to these conversations – though most are still trying to figure out an appropriate course of action regarding these inbound interactions. On the other side of the social coin, however, is the outbound interaction, which can be equally effective, but requires its own unique strategy. This session will explore ways your marketing teams can leverage social media and engage your customers on their preferred medium to gain a competitive advantage. Social media isn’t just for your customers – attend this session to find out how to maximize the effectiveness of y our outbound social campaigns.

There has been discussion over the past several years about the demise of the deskphone. Yet, if you look at the market, there are many desktop phone vendors out there doing quite well – and other equipment and solution vendors that have entered the hardphone market over the last two years. But, we also know there is an increase in the usage of softphones, both in enterprise and contact center environments, and dramatic rise in smartphone adoption, as well as growth of OTT offerings and the latest emerging technology, WebRTC. This session will attempt to make sense of the various, often seemingly conflicting trends, to understand what the future holds for communications endpoints and what issues will drive the market, from desktop to mobile to browser.