We know X + Y = Z. We also know companies know they want happy customers. So, if Z represents customers, what do X and Y represent? These unknowns in the customer experience equation stump companies. What are the two missing variables in this equation that will provide companies with the outcomes they desire?

A recent survey revealed 96% of Americans agree that their experience with a company’s customer service representatives has a major impact on their impression of the company overall (happy agents = happy customers). The agents themselves are critical brand ambassadors but, all too often, customers blame agents for bad customer experiences because they’re on the frontlines. Which brings us to the third variable: Technology. Businesses must value their customer support agents and arm them with better technology so they can do their jobs well and enable a better agent experience and, consequently, a better customer experience. That, in turn, will drive customer lifetime loyalty and revenue for the brand.

Filled with the most up-to-date statistics, research, and information on unified communications and collaboration, this session will focus on the UCC market, the players (your options), the challenges (what you need to know for successful deployment), and the future (why implementing UC today will prepare your business for future growth). 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 number of mobile devices entering the business environment, businesses are being forced to consider their options for handling the BYOD surge. Outside of prohibiting personal devices on corporate networks and risking limiting productivity and employee satisfaction, business are faced with the challenge of learning how to effectively support a broad spectrum of 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.

With business constantly looking for ways to reduce CAPEX, the challenge for providers becomes finding other, new, revenue opportunities. In today’s Anything-as-a-Service world of cloud computing, 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.

Effective service management requires optimization of everything from employee performance to customer experience to social media interactions. Many of the technologies highlighted to manage these tasks focus on the concept of real time, which has, in many cases, become an expectation. However, blindly focusing on real-time management of activities could come with heavy costs in the long run and it becomes critical not to become so infatuated with real-time that your staff exerts efforts reacting to insignificant occurrences. Instead, businesses should focus on “right time.” This session will discuss the concept of right time vs. real time, and how focusing on right-time processing can provide insight into which contacts are, in fact, larger trends that require attention and action. Attendees will learn how this intelligent approach saves the business valuable time and money, and helps increase the level of interactions.

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. Unfortunately, many users simply believe there is no choice, or they are unfamiliar with the options and the state of the art in voice quality. There is an emerging trend in both mobile and fixed services, called HD Voice. Anyone who has experienced an HD voice call knows the difference is simply astonishing. 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 just a nice-to-have, and why adoption of higher performance levels will increase significantly in the next years.

Whether you are a network operator, VAR, or integrator, the shrinking margins on hardware and software are taking their toll, as is the commoditization of bandwidth. You just can’t make a living on your traditional business. What can you do? The cloud offers a host of opportunities (pun intended) for you to expand your portfolio, become a more valuable partner for your customers, and create new stickiness in the process. It all adds up to new revenue streams and customer retention. This session is all about getting started as a cloud services provider and what you need to know about the technology, marketing strategy, staffing and training, and everything else to help you become a successful competitor in a cloudy market.

Your customers have left the building… what do you do? Indeed, there has been a significant mobile migration, and it’s something every business has to contend with as they seek to develop tighter relationships with customers. Some see it as a barrier to success; others see it as a pathway to growth. The fact is, the only way to effectively reach your existing and potential customers is on their terms. This session will explore opportunities to reach your mobile audience – and make it easy for them to reach you – from brand awareness to customer service.

Cisco has predicted that 90 percent of all Internet traffic will be video by 2014. That figure may seem high but, if it is even remotely near true figures, video is on the verge of a significant increase in usage. Much of this traffic will be attributed to individually made content uploaded to YouTube and other consumer-type consumption. But, an increasing amount will be generated by businesses, both in two-way and one-way (both live and on-demand) models. This session will discuss the use of business use, why it is poised for signification growth, how businesses can leverage video content both internally and externally, what technologies and resources are available for creation, organization, storage, management and distribution of content, and of course, how two-way and multi-party communication is part of the overall enterprise video story.

IT departments continue to struggle with finding a balance between corporate and personal activities on their enterprise networks. Fortunately, they have options. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to determine which approach is best for their needs. One logical alternative is the creation of multiple personas on mobile devices – mobile virtualization – allowing access to corporate resources only when the corporate persona has been invoked, but disallowing personal applications and services at the same time. This session will discuss the benefits and implementation strategies for multiple mobile identities as a means for managing mobile devices.

BYOD has become more than a trend – it’s the norm today. But for its benefits in terms of cost savings, flexibility, and user satisfaction, the challenges BYOD creates in terms of both endpoint and network security can become burdensome for IT staff. The cloud – the second dominant trend-become-reality today – provides an opportunity for service providers to not only relieve IT of that burden, but to create an additional revenue stream, creating a more valued relationship. This session will discuss how and why providers should look to add managed security services to their services menu.

The cloud has been touted as the next great technology for creating a more efficient and effective communications environment. This is as true for the contact center and customer service environment as it is for the general enterprise population. This session will explore how a cloud-based contact center platform can help increase your business’ customer service capabilities, how to choose the right cloud solution, how to properly implement it, and what it means for the future of your customer relationship teams.

With the breadth of UC platforms available today and their myriad features, many enterprises are throwing their hands in the air, still unable to seamlessly communicate with their business partners, employees, and customers. You’re lucky if your business partners and customers all use the same platform – but what do you do if they don’t?

If your company is using Vendor X and the party with whom you want to communicate is using Vendor Y, your end users can’t “talk” to each other. It’s like not being able to dial a phone number because the person you’re calling is on a different system. Rather than offering basic Interoperability, which is about standard presence and one-to-one chat, UC vendors should provide seamless, any-to-any, secure UC federation.

Interoperability is only the first step toward diverse systems and organizations working together. By adding their own property extension, they will never achieve out of the box Interoperability. Vendors have talked about it for years but have not made it a priority. Achieving Interoperability is only the tip of the iceberg and does not even begin to address the bigger picture. A seamless, any-to-any, secure UC federation enables organizations to communicate and collaborate in real-time with partners, suppliers, and customers, regardless of features and underlying UC platforms—as if they are all on the same UC platform. This all-inclusive solution is the concept of UC federation.

This session will discuss why UC Vendors are still stuck in solving interoperability while their customers have moved on to federation; how federation will enable partners, customers and employees to collaborate in real-time with external colleagues, regardless of the underlying UC platform; and how enterprises can become part of a UC clearinghouse where they can find “Federation-Ready” partners.

For businesses that depend on their mobile workers to deliver products or services to customers – including communications service providers – field service management has become a critical aspect of operations. For the most advanced, intelligent and powerful technology for optimizing field workforces, companies look to the cloud. By leveraging the power of the cloud, your mobile workforce has access to more data, in real-time, and provide better reliability than traditional on-premise solutions – all critical components of a solution that needs to be up-and-running for customers to get their products, and therefore, for the company to make money.

This session will discuss how cloud-based solutions are transforming the field workforces of service providers across the globe - translating into increased efficiencies, reduced operational costs, and satisfied, loyal customers.

• The benefits cloud provides for enterprise technology used in the field: easy integrations, fast deployments, lower cost of ownership, more speed and power, real-time visibility into the field, reliability and security
• How cloud technology in the field supports a more flexible mobile enterprise strategy, allowing businesses to support contracted workforces and BYOD policies with an application developed on HTML5 and delivered through the browser
• Additional capabilities cloud-based field service management solutions offer, such as mobility and social collaboration, and how they support more robust CRM systems

As cloud services become more standardized, service providers will find themselves turning to PaaS offerings as a way of creating differentiation. In fact, Frost & Sullivan says PaaS will be the next battleground for service providers, due to the high level of flexibility and ability to reduce costs while developing, testing and deploying new applications. In simple terms, Platform as a Service is an environment that allows applications to be developed (often without the need to software programmers), deployed and used (without the need for hardware), with little or no up-front cost to the user. Pricing is typically per month or year and per seat, and there is typically no capital needed to get started. All costs are typically operational expenses. This session will focus on how VARs, MSPs, Carriers, and agents can monetize the cloud with PaaS.

The customer service challenge in today’s mobile-social world has become meeting customers on their terms – allowing them to communicate using whatever medium or device they choose. With the introduction of new technologies forever on the horizon, the difficulty is a constant series or upgrades to ensure system compatibility. Does WebRTC offer a way around the device and system challenge? Some believe it is the ultimate customer service equalizer. This session will explore ways businesses can ensure compatibility with the latest customer tools and devices for communication, and whether WebRTC is, in fact, the ultimate customer communication tool.

Microsoft Lync has quickly become one of the hottest topics – and fastest growing technologies – in the enterprise UC space. Why? What’s different with Lync from Microsoft’s earlier attempt at becoming a key player in enterprise UC? What does Lync mean for your existing infrastructure – and for hardware vendors, in general? This session will discuss not only why Lync should be a key part of your enterprise communications strategy, but how to continue to leverage your existing technology while migrating to a Lync environment, what challenges you can expect to face and how to overcome them, and how to ensure your Lync experience exceeds expectations.

Businesses have taken a backwards approach towards integrating mobile technologies into business communications. Now is the time to use the cloud to disrupt and innovate. There are critical cloud-based messaging capabilities largely unknown to most organizations. This session will explore all the opportunities that exist when you combine cloud-based messaging with traditional telecommunication technology. Attendees will learn how to take advantage of cloud-based messaging to communicate in real-time, in person, or through automation, to deliver cutting-edge mobile and Web user experiences across the globe and how enterprises can embrace cloud-based messaging to enjoy ubiquitous internal (business) and external (personal) messaging across devices.

With multiple options available for supporting multi-site businesses, the key business drivers will always be service quality and cost. MPLS has become a common alternative due to its scalability and flexible any-to-any connectivity but there are alternatives, depending on customer needs, location, and budget. The one consistency is business are only going to become more dependent on their connectivity for business activities, providing an real opportunity for businesses who are able to deliver reliable, secure connections. This session will discuss best practices for ensuring QoS as a means of revenue assurance and why service providers can identify opportunities to extend their coverage through hybrid cloud offerings.

There was a time when building a contact center was relatively simple – you needed a building, you needed staff, and you needed phone lines. Technology has changed the contact center, opening new doors for customer engagement. Whether it’s the cloud, multichannel communications, unified communications, or mobility, the customer service game has changed and, to win, businesses must adapt accordingly to remain competitive. This session will consider the latest contact center technologies that are allowing customer service groups to become more accessible, more responsive, more agile, and more flexible both from an organizational and a customer perspective. What can you do? Where should you start? What are your best options and how can you ensure success and growth without disrupting your current state of affairs?

Despite data suggesting increased investment and deployment, the past decade has seen much lower true adoption of unified communications than expected. This is in large part due to end-user barriers, including difficulty installing and using devices, as well as a lack of true understanding of the benefits of UC. This session will tackle these challenges and help businesses move to higher adoption rates and more productive use of the unified communications tools in which they have invested. Discussions will include both hardware and software, as well as best practices for driving adoption at the user level.

With unified communications and other enterprise applications already seeing significant mobile adoption, the one element that is still struggling to gain real traction is video. This includes both two-way, interactive video (e.g., video calling/conferencing/collaboration) as well as one-way (live or on-demand) production. There are many reasons for this, including both technological and strategic hurdles that must be overcome before video will have the prolific presence it already has in fixed environments. This session will discuss why today’s enterprises must embrace mobile video, and what steps they can take to ensure both reliable delivery and user adoption.

As cloud adoption continues to grow, questions around trust and security to arise – some because of highly publicized breaches and others because businesses are asking the logical questions as they consider trusting their business applications and data to third parties. With a vast selection of vendors for businesses to partner with, you can’t afford not to be a trusted partner. This session will explore how cloud providers can build trust into their relationships – both from a technology and a partnership perspective – and ensure success in a highly competitive market.

Social media is here to stay, and your customers, employees, and partners are all part of the social world. In order to properly implement a social media plan for your business, you first have to understand what social media is and how to create an effective strategy. This session address social media from the basic fundamentals required for a successful social media implementation:

• Benefits vs. Risks
• Alignment with business objectives
• Executive Support of social initiatives
• Training requirements
• Building a social culture

Cloud technology is great – it offers several benefits, including significantly reduced hardware costs, affordable aggregated computing power, 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?

Businesses are looking for ways to increase productivity and leverage a wide range of integrated communications solutions to drive top-line revenue, while optimizing automation efficiencies to lower operational costs. As a result, Unified Communications (UC) has moved beyond the innovator stage and is now being implemented by businesses of all sizes. The cloud presents yet another opportunity for enterprises to increase their network efficiency and reduce capital expenditure, while remaining competitive. This session will discuss how a virtualized environment allows enterprises a broader range of deployment and operating scenarios, including:

• Server consolidation increases space utilization efficiency and reduces the number of physical servers, thereby reducing rack space, hardware maintenance and energy costs.
• Distributed enterprises can deliver UC functionality to their branch locations from a UC Server hosted in the cloud, while deploying IP PBXs or IP Business Gateways at remote or branch locations (reducing the overall costs of offering UC to all locations).
• Improved business continuity. Hosted virtual disaster recovery servers can be geographically separated from the customer’s business location.

It’s no secret many telecom and cloud providers are struggling for sales – it’s an in increasingly competitive market and businesses are facing shrinking budgets. This session will consider these trends and discuss eight tips any service provider can use to increase sales by as much as 100%.

With all the chatter about social media and its role in the customer relationship, businesses have started giving more some thought to their involvement in the social realm. In fact, many have already started listening to some of the social conversations taking place, and some have even started some level of response. Without a specific social strategy in place, however, these activities become siloed, highly fragmented, and largely inconsistent, eventually having the reverse effect as was intended. This session will discuss best practices for engaging your customers on the social scene: what are expectations, who should handle engagement, how to effectively coordinate social activity and service within your organization to build a social community with your audience.

Massive data growth, aging and inefficient infrastructure, new software and costly legacy applications provide challenges that business and IT organizations face daily. Cloud computing is often touted as the “magic bullet” that can help businesses cut costs, generate revenue and create new value. But, if cloud is the path to business Utopia, what's stopping more organizations from making the move? While few dispute the potential benefits of cloud computing, that potential means little if the path to success is riddled with complexity and operational disruption. This session will discuss best practices for developing a cloud strategy that suits your organization’s needs, starting with a simple question: What is the business problem cloud will help solve?

As the BYOD trend continues to grow, businesses are seeing employees using multiple mobile devices in their daily work, including a growing adoption of tablets. The challenge enterprises face is turning those tablets into true business tools by extending the right business applications and services to those devices. This session will explore how businesses can leverage the tablet phenomenon to extend useful business tools and applications to tablets to enable employees to increase their mobile productivity beyond simply checking email, to turn tablets into truly useful business tools.

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 an iPhone, he cannot – in the middle of that call – seamlessly switch to a video chat on an Android tablet, or to an IM exchange on a laptop. The byproduct of being unable to integrate disparate mobile applications, platforms and devices is an enterprise with segregated communications modalities – voice, video, text and collaboration – inhibiting increased productivity and true seamless mobility. Service providers and network operators hold the key to truly unified communications, because they are the common intersection of user and application/service, regardless of device. This session will detail how 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.

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 you need a solid strategy for social response, beyond the overall corporate social strategy you’ve just developed. 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? 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.

You’ve heard about the Cloud, its many variants, and its diverse benefits. You also know that every business is facing tremendous pressure to cut budgets without sacrificing productivity, which is where cloud computing and other next-gen technologies are winning. But, despite all the perceived benefits, the ultimate question still remains, what real business impacts are these technology changes having on your business? This session will discuss how the technological gains relate to business benefits, in the short term as well as well into the future, taking into consideration future growth, technology evolution, and other relevant factors.

Since 1983, when Time magazine names the Computing its “machine of the year,” the business world has undergone constant transformation through increases in productivity and efficiency delivered by advances in information technology. Thirty years later, those improvements in productivity and efficiency promise to reach unprecedented levels by going unplugged. This session will discuss how business can most effectively extend their desktop apps to their mobile and remote workforces, how decision makers can make informed decisions on how and where users should interact with different business applications, and the resulting return that can be expected, as they respond to the realities of today, while seeking to improving upon the all-important customer experience.

As we continue to witness an onslaught of multimedia capable devices, all of which are being connected to the Internet, and with emerging technologies, like WebRTC and other OTT services, poised to leverage those devices to drive a new age of communications, the question must be, is your communications network up to it? With SIP having the same capabilities, it has not really been tested, since Telcos built PSTN/POTS replicating networks that have deprived us of 50 years development. It is not only about bandwidth; QoS can bring the user experience a magnitude higher when data and real-time traffic share the same network. Enabling quality on the Internet is quite easy, but meaningless if there is no “toll to enter the highway.” This session will discuss how to ensure your network is ready to handle the next wave of communications traffic, but also how you can monetize it.

You’ve come to the realization that your customers are engaging with each other through social channels – and they’re talking about your brand. You’ve understood you need to invest not only in the right technology, but also the time in developing the right social strategy, as well as ensuring appropriate staffing, education, and training. What steps do you need to take? How can you be certain you’ve developed an appropriate strategy? What technology do you need? How do you get buy-in from you staff and bring them up-to speed on the technology? This session will provide a look at getting started with social media to meet your customers on their level.

Businesses are looking for the latest technologies to help them gain the upper hand – today’s tech du jour is cloud computing. For many enterprises, they are fearful of the risks of public cloud, and tackle the building of a private cloud environment, which will maximize ROI on existing technology investments, while reducing initial risk. Still, many of these cloud projects fail, not because of poor implementation, but poor planning and strategy. A good plan can fail with poor implementation, but a poor plan is likely to fail even with proper implementation. This session will uncover common mistakes made by enterprises as they develop their cloud plans and begin rolling them out. By understanding where others have failed, you will ensure the success of your cloud deployment.

Organizations are already struggling to effectively manage voice, video, audio, and other communications’ data across many disparate systems on their IT infrastructure. Now, add in mobility, a requisite for successful business operations today. As the need for business resiliency to decrease the dependence to any physical location or system grows, businesses are increasingly integrating cloud-based technologies. Collaboration solutions and other business applications delivered from the cloud are designed to support the complex needs of remote workers, global travelers, and virtual meetings, as a business’s needs change, whether it’s opening new offices, expanding inside existing ones, or hiring new employees. This session will discuss the trends surrounding the adoption of collaborative technologies in the cloud, the benefits of these solutions to the end user, and the business value the cloud brings to the industry today.

With every online transaction, tweet, post, check-in, photo post, trade, sale or registration, identity data is being exchanged. Identity data is proliferating at a monumental scale, and it’s the foundation of a new economy – one in which consumers trade their data for savings and benefits, and corporations leverage identity data to create new revenue streams. This new Identity Economy is fueled by personal identity data, and the companies and institutions that are first to unify, manage and secure this data will be the ones that thrive. But, security is paramount – Consumers want to know that their data is safe, and how it’s being used. Cable and telecommunications providers need to find ways to secure the data even as they use it to create new products or market to customers. Companies must be mindful of providing transparency to their customers and stakeholders in order to build trust that the identity data they gather is used responsibly. In the Identity Economy, trust, transparency, privacy and security are all important issues. This session will discuss how explains how service providers can lead the charge by using identity data to improve customer experience and deliver personalized, high-value services, driving trust and loyalty.

Not all social networks are created equal. But, it’s common understanding that every business needs a social presence today – simply, it’s expected by customers. But with the variety of social environments available, each requiring a different strategy and implementation, it can be difficult to understand which is best for your business. This session will discuss the different social networking options available to businesses, their benefits, and how to most effectively leverage their capabilities depending on your individual business size, needs, and capabilities. Not all businesses are created equal either, nor are all customers. This session will help you connect your business efforts with your customers in a way that utilizes your assets to deliver results.

In all corners of your organization, social is changing the way your employees connect – it’s happened in their personal lives, and it’s starting to take hold in their business lives as well. To move from getting a “like” to getting a customer, you need to understand how social technology is changing business collaboration and driving business success. Social technologies are the next step in become a leader in your market. If engaged customers increased their satisfaction level, created engaged employees will do the same, driving business value through social behavior. This session will discuss social enterprise tools, how they vary from mainstream social media, and how they can be integrated into existing IT infrastructures to seamlessly create a social business that will have a natural competitive advantage: social businesses have been shown to deliver 26% more revenue per employee, 40% year-over-year increase in new business, churn reduction, reduced time to market of new products.

Over the past couple of decades, there have been revolutionary changes in the way we conduct business and communicate at a personal level. However, the way we communicate at work has not kept pace with these profound changes. Today, 75 percent of businesses in the U.S. have mobile employees. Yet many companies still rely on on-premises technology built for the 1980s work environment, when everyone came into the office. These archaic systems are simply obsolete. They do not enable employees and customers to communicate in the ways they prefer and are used to in their personal lives. And these systems do not work seamlessly with the smartphones, tablets, apps and laptops employees carry in their pockets and handbags and use every day. Nor do they integrate with the business applications employees use every day, from their UC capabilities to the Salesforce applications.

All of this is possible in the cloud. This session will discuss the New World of Work, how it will evolve even further, and how cloud-based solutions are ideally suited for supporting this new environment.

The prepaid market has gone through many changes over the past few years and many have looked upon it as a dying industry. Yet the opposite is happening. The ubiquity of VoIP, prepaid mobile and new applications are driving the industry into new markets with capabilities that are attracting entrepreneurs, service providers, retailers, wireless and carriers alike. Prepaid is becoming a simple add-on that promotes customer loyalty, brand awareness and large revenues if done properly. This session will explain where the prepaid market is, where it’s going, how to integrate it and how to profit from it.

Would you like to reach more prospects, convert more of them into customers, and earn their continued loyalty? The Internet is challenging the global hegemony, and the increased availability and adoption of smart devices is pushing the change to a mobile-centric environment. Your challenge is to adapt your goals and processes to integrate today’s social-mobile mindset and the needs of your three business constituencies – marketing, sales, and customer service.

By leveraging the latest tools, software, and engagement techniques, your business will be able to capitalize on the overlap within business groups to improve your overall business value delivery. This session will discuss the ways today’s latest tools, technology, and services can drive the overall bottom line results and create an efficient flow of information within your corporate structure that drive sustainable growth.

This session will provide an update on the latest disruptive communications technology known as WebRTC. While many believe WebRTC has the potential to transform the communications landscape, at the very least, it will be a communications technology the entire communications ecosystem will have to address – and one from when it has the potential to benefit from significantly. This session will discuss the transformative nature of WebRTC, implementation options, and examples of how it has already been deployed today.

Organizations are faced with protecting data against external and internal threats across a complex threat landscape. Modern trends in enterprise computing, the rise of social media, the cloud, mobility and the era of big data are making insider threats harder to identify, and giving insiders more ways to pass protected information to outsiders with less chance of discovery. Learn how to provide an integrated data security and privacy approach delivered through the three-tiered strategy of Understand and Define, Secure and Protect, and Monitor and Audit. Protecting data requires a 360-degree, holistic approach: with deep, broad expertise in the security and privacy space, discover how you can help your organization define and implement such an approach.

The telco problem isn’t new – the Internet age has created an OTT stream of applications and services that are diluting “revenue per bit.” In other words, there are any number of services that are leveraging network assets for which operators aren’t getting paid. Likewise, these very few of these application developers are enjoying any real traction, because they don’t have direct access to a subscriber base and must depend on generic word of mouth, hoping to catch a viral twitter account. In order to regain centrality in their network value proposition, operators must engage third parties (e.g., advertisers, developers, etc.) with a new business model, which will benefit both parties but, importantly, will build traction and loyalty through an ecosystem. This session will discuss strategies operators can use as the seek to create their valued ecosystems, which entities they should seek to engage, what key infrastructure elements should they look to leverage, and how they can effectively market their ecosystems as effectively as Apple’s iTunes.

Influencing customer behavior is nothing new. It’s long been a tactic of successful businesses. The problem is, few strategies have driven consistent results. The latest trend in customer behavior modification, however, has the potential to change that trend, largely thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices and apps. 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. It can be implemented in a variety of ways, from earning badges or points, or applying rewards that can be traded in for monetary equivalents, or others. Airline frequent flyer programs are an early form of gamification that has proven highly successful. This session will discuss how any business can leverage the mobile explosion and the social nature of mobile apps to create gamification strategies to drive loyalty and revenue.

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.

Virtualization has taken the IT world by storm, but to date, the communications market has been mostly unaffected - relying instead on proprietary appliances for numerous functions. But as network hardware begins to be released as software, carriers are expected to save money and benefit greatly from new levels of flexibility related to hosting their network in private and virtual private clouds. By leveraging software, commercial hardware, and virtualization, the software telco will be able to meet the Age of Acceleration challenge head on. The software telco market represents the biggest disruption and opportunity in the carrier spending this decade. This session will present a look at the upcoming Software Telco Congress by providing a primer on why service providers are so keen to understand NFV and how it is poised to create new revenue opportunities for them.

Every business has the same goal: increasing satisfaction and loyalty among its customer base. They also have the same challenge: maximizing the customer experience when they have questions or concerns. It’s unrealistic to think customers won’t have a need to contact you but, there is a wealth of information available to help improve the experience when they do. Between Web interactions, calls, IVR usage, and even social media, businesses have a veritable goldmine of information they can leverage to ensure the simplest resolutions to customer interactions. How can you limit the time it takes to resolve issues by ensuring the right individuals are able to address them? What concerns are more easily handled by self-service technologies, giving customers a sense of self-satisfaction and freeing up your workforce for other critical engagements? Which product or service purchases tend to create the greatest volume of inquiries? This session will uncover how your customer analytics can help your business make the most of your resources while significantly increasing customer satisfaction.

Throughout three days, panels have weighed in on dozens of topics impacting enterprises, their communications capabilities, and how their technology investments (or lack thereof) will impact their businesses. This session will wrap them all together to discuss underlying themes from the previous three days, what the next great opportunities are for enterprise communications, what the future may hold.

Mobility is no longer an enterprise option – it’s a core component of their IT strategies. BYOD is a certainly a driver, but the cloud, unified communications, virtualization, and other key technology trends are equally important drivers. Though some of the questions around BYOD, cloud, and mobility are being answered – many of them in the previous three days, enterprise mobile requirements are only going to continue to evolve. This session will consider what we’ve learned to date, and take a look ahead at some of the key issues around mobility and how they will continue to drive enterprise evolution.

The past decade has brought unsurpassed change to CSPs. IP technology has, in fact, driven an evolution few could have imagined at the turn of the century. Previously high barriers to entry have been lowered; cutthroat competition has taken its place. Traditional telecom silos have been torn down; creativity and multichannel communication present a horizontal replacement. But, margins on their traditional voice and messaging services continue to dwindle, CSPs must seek out the next cash cow. The market has evolved into a three-way no-holds-barred cage match between Telcos, Cable MSOs, and non-traditional competitors. What are the key moves winning providers will need to make in order to topple their competition? How will they ensure success in this ever more competitive market? This session examines the changing market and strategy options open for traditional and next-gen service providers, what mistakes should they learn from, and what are their key ingredients for success.