This session will expose participants to some of the more significant market changes resulting from the maturity of open source telecom technology. As open source-based IP-PBX and VoIP products continue to gain traction in the mainstream enterprise marketplace, manufacturers of these systems are moving in from the bleeding edge and increasing the robustness and depth of features and capabilities.

In many cases integration of the best-in-class features, from development partners and other open source innovators and developers, is the best method to keep up with the pace of customer and market demands. And in some cases, the reverse model is becoming the norm in the proprietary telecom space. Leading manufacturers are looking to select the best pieces of the app and feature world, regardless of the underlying code base, to not only address market demands, but also to fend off competition from all comers – including open source leaders.

These changes in the perception and acceptance of open source in the mainstream will place new demands on the community – demands that will help to strengthen open source projects going forward.

Companies are outlining their list of “must-haves” as the future of online collaboration continues to take shape. With the ever-present challenge of effectively managing projects from start to finish, how can teams stay on task without being inundated with time-intensive training, disparate files, teams in varying geographical locations, and interruptions to the natural workflow process? Not to mention that we live in a world of digital assets, so being able to share, edit, and manage these projects in a secure manner are all essential needs in the current workplace.

This session will discuss current trends and technologies that are enabling increased collaboration among enterprise teams, and how the latest tools can help teams of all sizes better automate processes, manage projects, communicate and significantly reduce workload.

Microsoft Lync is one of the hottest discussion topics in enterprise UC. 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 communications environment, including a look at the results of Nemertes Research’s 2012-13 benchmark of more than 200 organizations and what they are doing with Lync, what’s driving their decisions, and what benefits and challenges are they seeing in their Lync deployments.

In a world where everyone is connected to everything - your organization’s infrastructure has no boundaries. Successful companies are doing business in motion. The challenge is managing and securing an infrastructure that connects an endless array of intelligent devices and sensors that are outside your control. Learn how to create a Mobile Enterprise -- fundamentally changing and creating new value for customer, supplier and employee interaction. In doing so, new data and transactions and analytics workloads provide value and insight with the peace of mind that the security and management discipline required are future ready.

This session explores the thought that your organization could definitely be spending a lot less time on social than they are currently. Managing your time in a word of immediate response requires some easy listening and productive engagement approaches. Many companies are now investing heavily in this space for tools that integrate key networks and tools in order to drive campaigns across all the major social networks and then aggregate reporting and analytics to deliver a single view of these campaigns and their outcomes in order to optimize cross-platform engagement

Participants will explore the fundamentals of social media and expose time-saving tips and effective tactics to help you gain back valuable time from some of the trendy time wasters that are eating into the bottom line. Whether you’re a large enterprise, small business, or public organization, you share similar challenges when it comes to helping teams do what matters most and getting users and customers what they need, when they need it. This session will help you overcome many of those challenges in today’s social world.

Supported by Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and Unified Communications (UC), enterprises can enable workers to essentially carry their desk phone extensions and features with them, wherever they are working on any given day – via VoIP clients and other UC applications on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. With rich UC applications features such as call transfer, conference call, corporate directory listings, and presence, workers can collaborate and communicate in real-time, increasing productivity by maintaining an always one presence.

But wireless and Internet connected mobile devices present unique security challenges that differ dramatically from traditional communications and data security methods that rely on firewalls, user authentication, and encryption. Further, these mobile devices can expose sensitive network traffic, and proprietary or confidential data and communications, to multiple vulnerabilities.

Enterprises that have embraced SBCs, and other components of UC security, are proving they can securely protect and extend communications to external parties, unlocking new ways of collaborating with clients, partners, distributed employees and the supply chain. This session will consider the Enterprise SBC as a means of satisfying security and privacy requirements, with signaling and traffic encryption, media and signaling forking, network demarcation, and threat detection and mitigation, 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.

The FCC continues to forge ahead with Universal Service and ICC reform, potentially ushering in a dramatically new era for the communications industry. This session will provide an in-depth look at what changes the FCC has made to the federal USF and what they mean for service providers, including both the wider implications on IP communications providers as a group as well as the specific changes providers will face in terms of contributions and compliance.

Your customers are turning to social media to provide feedback to and about your brand. Recent research highlights this trend where 64% of social media users indicated that more responsive brands on social networks would benefit from greater loyalty and purchasing. While there is opportunity for companies to improve customer loyalty by being more responsive, businesses struggle to make social media actionable in directing relevant customer input to the front-line staff who could and would resolve issues in real-time if they were kept in the loop. Businesses that fail to adapt to the new online social world could be reaching less that 1% of their unhappy customers.

This session will feature a case study of how a Fortune 1000 restaurant chain improved customer loyalty and quarter-over-quarter sales through effective social media response management, and discuss how your company, whether a small, single-site business or a multi-national corporation, can follow similar strategies to save at-risk customers, increase sales, enhance the customer experience, and improve employee performance.

With three leading options in the market for IP-based phone systems – on-premises, hosted (cloud) and hybrid-hosted – consumers may have a difficult time deciding which model best fits their business needs. The size and structure of your business, available resources and projected future growth are just some of the factors that should be considered when choosing the type of communications system that works best for your company. Cases can be made for all three alternatives, depending more on your business needs than on the size of your organization. Quality alternatives leveraging any of these strategies exist for any size organization.

To help you navigate the these tricky, yet highly important, business decisions, this session will investigate how each system works, necessary requirements for optimal use and the advantages and disadvantages for you and your customers, so you can decide on the model that fits your needs best.

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.

Social media extends market reach and brand exposure to be inclusive of behaviors previously considered private. Separating public from private is unequivocally altering the very nature of human-to-human and business-to-human interactions. As such, senior marketers must be supported to properly provide active, engaged participation through myriad social networks.

Learn how to organize your social business to engage a world that moves at breakneck speed and nuance your participation in each network to appropriately optimize engagement. Join this discussion for guidance on how to tune in to your customers’ conversations and inform the business on the outcomes of these critical new engagements across the customer lifecycle.

Video conferencing used to be an element of science fiction novels. Today, there are approximately one million installed telepresence and video management endpoints across a number of businesses, with the overall enterprise telepresence market projected to reach $5 billion by 2016. Further, an increasingly mobile workforce is adding to this growing trend with its demand for faster service, sharper quality and supporting mobile technology and hardware. Emerging as an essential IT service, the video conferencing technology enables enterprises to cut costs, increase productivity and improve collaboration. However, in order to realize the benefits video solutions offer, organizations must first understand, and then address, the management challenges the technology presents.

This session will discuss top challenges enterprise IT managers face when integrating video conferencing technology into the workplace, including: integration with existing IT infrastructure, mixed-vendor environments, IT strain, limited visibility, collecting/presenting data, and troubleshooting, with an eye towards delivering a best practices guide for launching a video initiative within your organization.

Mobile commerce is expected to grow globally at a rate of 97 percent annually over the next three years, according to a KPMG report. This is an enormous opportunity for service providers to offer additional value added services. However, it also presents challenges. Although Near Field Communications (NFC) helps simplify purchasing, the complexity of managing and securing such communications and transactions when NFC is not available needs to be tackled to move mobile commerce to the next level. This session will consider the core mobile commerce components, including payments and top-ups for subscriptions, POS transactions and mobile banking, and provide perspective on the current market landscape and how mobile value added services, when coupled with the right infrastructure, can enable mobile commerce to become a reality.

Facebook has 250 million photos uploaded each day. There are 175 million new tweets every day, and LinkedIn has two new members every second. This is the social reality in which we live. Despite much concversation, what remains unclear is how the contact center should play in this environment.

What we do know is social media has changed customer behavior, and businesses and their customer-facing employees must be prepared to respond via new technologies. This session will consider how to design and implement and effective social strategy in your business, including defining what social means for your business, who should be responsible, and how to properly implement the technologies to meet your specific design needs and train your staff to effectively use them.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has been in full swing for a couple of years now, and there's no going back. Enterprises have adopted a policy of allowing users to use their own devices to access corporate networks and resources. With it comes the cost savings of not having to purchase as many mobile devices, and user satisfaction increases when they are able to choose their preferred devices and providers (and avoid having to carry multiple devices). But the benefits don't come without challenges -- the user experience must be preserved, security policies must accommodate these multiple devices and operating systems, and IT has to content with managing applications and access across different platforms. This session looks at what businesses can do to mitigate risks and ensure performance while still giving your users the device freedom they demand.

Telecommunications companies are looking for new growth opportunities in the cloud – Identity Services are a natural fit. Telcos have valuable customer identity data but, to participate in the Identity Economy, customers must fully trust them with that data. Implementing an Identity Services strategy will help Telcos build that trust through security, privacy and transparency assurances while opening essential new revenue streams. This session will discuss the formation of “identity-centered markets” and the emerging role and value of identity services in the Identity Economy, and why these issues and ideas are valuable to the Telcos and their subscribers.

Panelists will explain how identity can function as both an enabler of cloud services and even be a cloud service itself, how it is not only the valued commodity but the new currency of the Internet. And since identity data is an enabler for commerce and markets – enabling transactions or being the very subject of transactions – Telcos are in a unique position to build a market ecosystem for securely transferring identity data, fostering revenue growth while increasing customer satisfaction, all the while generating new monetization opportunities.

Brand advocacy has zoomed to the top of CMO’s agendas. In a recent IBM survey, CMOs across the world said their #1 priority is to enhance customer loyalty and encourage satisfied customers to advocate their brands. Join brand advocacy expert, Rob Fuggetta, and learn about real-world case studies on how companies are building their brands and businesses by turning their Brand Advocates into powerful marketing forces. Rob will discuss how to systematically identify and energize Brand Advocates plus track results from advocacy programs. He will share surprising insights about who Brand Advocates are; what makes them tick; and best practices for engaging and rewarding these influential consumers and business buyers. (Do you know what Advocates crave most? Here’s a hint: It isn’t money.)

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.

Hosted PBX providers offer their customers significant cost savings and an advanced telephony features while eliminating the need for customers to procure and manage their own communications network infrastructures. However, the need – and regulatory mandate – for emergency services brings with it a host of challenges for these providers, including servicing nomadic users within and beyond the service provider coverage footprint, meeting FCC/CRTC, state and local E911 regulations, and efficiently provisioning and maintaining customer records in 911 databases. This session will discuss the key E911 challenges faced by hosted VoIP providers and their customers, and the solutions available to address these challenges in today’s price-competitive environment.

This session will cover DSAT Analysis – the process of behind the detailed collection, aggregation, codification, review, reporting and analysis of the specific customer service transactions identified as “Dissatisfied” or “Unsatisfactory” by customers.

Attendees will learn how to take advantage of the massive amounts of data in the support center by properly analyzing the information and improving both the customer care experience as well as the products/services that are offered by the organization, and how to turn unsatisfied experiences into opportunities.

We all know that self-conscious feeling: “What if someone sees me talking to my mobile? What will they think I’m doing?” This is a barrier that has prevented some speech technologies from making inroads into general user acceptance. Thanks to Apple, people are already much more comfortable talking to their device, and will become even more so. The perceived embarrassment will dissipate to the point where people will think you’re odd if they see you TYPING into your device.

This will help voice biometric-enabled solutions and voice biometrics in general. By definition, voice biometrics involves you being prompted visually by an app to speak to your device for the purposes of authenticating and verifying your identity. This will accelerate the adoption of voice biometrics into the mobile user experience. We’re moving beyond simple speech recognition to speech understanding. While voice biometrics isn't an extension of this technically, in users’ minds however, voice biometrics is nearer to the SIRI understanding of speech than it is to simple speech recognition.

This session will discuss the evolution of voice biometrics, why businesses should consider it, and how to successfully deploy a voice biometrics solution.

Lines have blurred between traditional dedicated hosting and cloud computing services, as customers progressively want consistent and reliable service levels across both architectures, complete with all-inclusive SLAs. The emergence of cloud services platforms is presenting organizations of all sizes with IT challenges, as well as opportunities, changing the information and communications needs of both internal and external customers. Demand for more open and flexible information and telecom services is leading growing numbers of organizations and the services providers who serve them to adopt hybrid IT approaches that combine both private and public clouds, thus changing the role of IT professionals.

Leveraging a partner helps accelerate the transformation of communications providers into cloud service providers. This session will explore the challenges and opportunities for CSPs looking to offer cloud services including: Why cloud? Why now? Public or Private or Hybrid? How do I monetize? How do I become a successful cloud services provider?

For a majority of its existence, the contact center has been perceived as a primarily reactive medium, where the enterprise controlled the frequency and depth of interaction with customers, leaving customers at the mercy of a landline phone call, long wait times and having to repeat themselves to numerous customer service representatives.

Todays new channels of engagement, including social media, mobile and video platforms, have created a new, empowered customer with whom businesses cannot afford to engage with outdated methods. Contact centers need to evolve in order to engage with the new data-rich customer base on customers’ terms. Businesses must unify customer contact technology with consumer preferences in order to meet both the expectations of customers as well as the objectives of the business. But how do they do so in a way that improves the efficiency and profitability of a customer service operation?

This session will discuss how to leverage the technologies that allow businesses to seamlessly and efficiently deliver exceptional, channel-agnostic customer experiences, from social media to mobile to video and beyond. This means addressing how people, processes and technologies are brought together in the next-generation of customer contact to deliver interactions that not only matter, but also deliver significant bottom-line results and brand devotion.

The cloud is well-equipped to run a variety of modern applications — from Exchange and SharePoint, to the latest Web apps. But, how do you tell which applications are suited to a cloud deployment and which are better off running on legacy or in-house systems? Once you know which apps to move to the cloud, do you have a plan in place to ensure a successful migration? This session will cover the top considerations and best practices for application migration to the cloud — including a step-by-step assessment of common application requirements and how they affect your choice of deployment. Attendees will come away from this event poised to successfully plan and execute a migration of their apps to the cloud, and know which legacy apps are better left alone.

Expanding footprint, adding a new service, or entering a new market segment requires careful planning for VoIP operators. A key part of planning is running the numbers. What is the investment? How long is the payback and ROI? What are the risks?

This session will consider high level business models for introducing new services, like wholesale termination, SIP trunking, and Hosted PBX services, using the latest engineering methods and financial estimates. Understand whether these growth strategies would make sense for your operation, customer, or client. Or see how these high level modeling techniques can help you to ask the right questions and see the key factors that will drive your financial results.

As companies grow and evolve, they face new challenges. It is crucial that companies’ customer service infrastructures grow and evolve to accommodate these changes as well. Cornerstone pieces of customer service infrastructure, such as contact centers, are often at the center of these shifts, and must maintain their functionality and efficiency in order to serve growing customer bases and personnel changes. However many companies face the challenge of integrating multiple contact center sites, including multiple centers as well as remote or home-based agents.

Linking these geographically disparate agents can prove to be a difficult task, which can be alleviated by moving to cloud-based contact centers. Managers charged with curating contact center channels and applications stand to benefit from the use of virtual, cloud-based contact centers as they seek to moderate volume spikes, consolidate interactions into unified customer records, enhance caller experiences, all the while seeking to reduce costs and increase agent capabilities and flexibility.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been a hot topic in the IT community for years. Cloud-sourcing VDI offers the enterprise new opportunities for security, centralization, mobility, and business continuity while avoiding much of the upfront investment of traditional in-house deployments. Utilizing cloud-based VDI to centralize application deployment, secure corporate property, or scale the IT enterprise brings flexibility and a layer of abstraction that was not previously available. There are many different delivery strategies on the market with different benefits, nuances, and use-cases. While most agree that IT’s consumption of infrastructure is changing drastically, how do you choose which is the right model for your business?

This session will discuss business and technology drivers for cloud and managed VDI, TCO benefits, and the best deployment options for your business.

VoIP services are clearly in the process of replacing traditional TDM and LEC services, yet the sales approach may be very different. This session will focus on the sales of VoIP services via indirect channels such as sales agents and partners. It will also differentiate between selling to larger or smaller organizations as well as sales of complete unified communications solutions, SIP trunking, and hosted PBX. The target audiences will include prospective sales partners as well as service providers looking to enhance their market distribution models.

It often seems easy to define – unified communications – merging communications from different customers, with varied needs, communicating through several mediums all unified within the Contact Center. But the reality is that there are countless variations on the UC theme that can make it challenging to bring UC into the contact center environment, from both a technology and staffing perspective.

This session will discuss how the 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.

Cloud services and solutions play a critical role in the cloud ecosystem. With the cloud comes increased complexities and an increased need for integration, aggregation and automation capabilities. This is a disruptive change for both business and IT, and constitutes a series of challenges, coupled with new requirements. Leveraging the cloud requires more than just technology and platform migration. It requires a common platform across providers to design, build and operate a solution with a single point of accountability and transparency to enable successful transition to the cloud model.

This session provides an overview of how innovative cloud brokerage technologies are helping streamline cloud sourcing, procurement, on-boarding, integration, aggregation, billing and use of different cloud services for cost savings, centralized management and increased control.

Despite the recent surge in SIP traffic and SIP-to-SIP interconnection, many service providers and enterprises have yet to make the switch from their legacy circuit-based infrastructure to a SIP-based network. Of course, the network migration from TDM to SIP trunking has its benefits and its challenges — especially when that network spans as many as 80 countries and represents one of the largest global networks in the world. This session shares the lessons learned and results achieved during that migration, as well as the business case behind the migration to SIP trunking services, benefits of TDM-to-SIP migration, as well as some of the challenges they can expect to face and how to avoid them.

Social media has changed the way that many people think about privacy. In general, we seem to be more willing to share the details of our personal lives with members of our social networks. Does this shift apply to the way that we feel about sharing personal details with companies?

This session will discuss current attitudes towards sharing private information with companies changing as well; public awareness of social listening tools; available user controls; and the implications on your business as you seek to better understand you customers and deliver a more satisfying service experience?

What if the workday of an IT professional looked more like Facebook and less like an endless sea of red, green and yellow lights? What if millions of IT pros around the world collaborated with each other to solve problems, share best practices, and get good deals? What if the tech industry actually listened to them? What are the hot buying and deployment trends? IT is going social and it’s transforming how IT pros discover, buy and manage technology. Come here how “social IT” is powering this transformation.

This session will provide an introduction to “Social IT” by exploring how IT managers effectively use IT social networks to do their jobs. He will demonstrate how they use some of the free tools available to inventory and manage networks and how to utilize the active communities to interact with other IT pros to share solutions and solve everyday problems.

As service providers continue to evolve, they are offering a greater variety of products and services besides just dial tone. Today’s service providers offer a range of Unified Communications services so they and their resellers can provide more robust and complete communications solutions to customers, such as SMS messaging, Fax, Shortcode Messaging, Colocation Hosting, and Cloud-based IP PBX systems. This session will discuss not only what these additional revenue generating services are, but how you can package them effectively for maximum profitability.

There’s no question customers are more fickle today than ever – customer behavior is anything but consistent, and brand loyalty is at a premium. This new age of customer power has been driven by disruptive technologies like social media and mobile applications, and the concept of ubiquitous connectivity, which enables customers to communicate, collaborate, research, and purchase anywhere, any time. This means you, as a business, must not only be on call 24/7 to respond to customer needs, but you must be agile enough to react to changing needs to constantly heighten your customers’ experiences. This session will discuss how the cloud can drive that flexibility and agility, allowing you to provide exceptional customer care in today’s always on, always connected world.

Enterprise mobility is one of the fastest growing areas of business, allowing companies to virtually connect with customers and employees from anyplace in the world. CIOs are facing more decisions than ever when it comes to managing their mobile workforce. Employees expect to be able to do their work on multiple platforms, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones.

This session will dive into the various components of an enterprise mobility solution, provide best practices to ensure they are successful and explain how they integrate together to enable companies to grow their business. Topics will include: mobile enterprise application platforms, enterprise app stores, mobile device management, expense management, and analytics.

Today’s telecom industry is faced with the challenge of tracking and managing Big Data and, at the same time, leveraging it to understand behavior and needs in order to develop and monetize new service offerings. Market leaders, however, are quickly realizing that they cannot afford to store and manage petabyte-scale raw detailed data over time. Big Data may offer big business gains, but hidden costs and complexity present barriers. This session considers the big cost of Big Data, technology, and deployment options that best leverage IT investments. With managed costs, Big Data offers overwhelming opportunity for the telecom market.

Social media has transformed the way we connect with each other. We all have a voice, and we make ourselves heard, sharing wisdom and gossip, connecting with new friends, and documenting our lives. This new communication channel has empowered us and changed our expectations of the world, including the companies with which we interact.

Today, we are more influenced by comments from friends and anonymous reviews than we are from traditional online or TV ads that we easily ignore. That means the game is changing for businesses of all sizes and types. It’s no longer about telling your customers what to think and do. It’s about listening and engaging, guiding and supporting. Creating a Facebook page is a start, but let’s be clear: Having a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter isn’t enough. People, not sites, are the fabric of the new Web. As a company, it’s not only possible, but also imperative, to develop a relationship with each of your customers.

Cloud computing, by its very nature, mandates that an IT group relinquish a certain degree of control, which is an uncomfortable and unnatural act for an IT department. So, why the unrelenting push towards cloud computing? One major contributor is that, unlike most new technologies associated with IT, cloud buzz is coming from, among other sources, the C-Level executives.

The method of successfully applying cloud-level technologies to an organization is as unique as the company to which it is being applied. The cloud solution that best fits a data-centric analysis firm is quite different than a cloud solution that would fit a social networking communications company. However, there are fundamental tenets that can be applied to any company’s strategy to manage expectations and to actually improve control as costs are driven down by the application of cloud technology.

This session will consider both the business and technical aspects of cloud and how it is changing the face of our industry, and discuss how your IT team can avoid common pitfalls and get the most from your company’s investment in the cloud.

Do you want new products and services to augment your revenue stream? Are your competitors leaping ahead? Would you like ways to encourage your customers to consume premium bandwidth? Does the prospect of reaching a new geographic footprint, markets and opportunities seem daunting? Do you think a cloud offering is the way to do all this, but you don't have the skills, resources or time?

This session will explain how to expedite your time to market and expand your geographical reach through cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), allowing you to create new sources of revenue, increase premium bandwidth consumption, customer count, ARPU and overall valuation.