2017 promises to be a year of dramatic change in the communications and collaboration market. Nowhere is this more evident than in the addition of Real Time Communications into the range of web based applications. Technologies like WebRTC and the ever more real time friendly internet are enabling the direct integration of communications into the application and the business process flow. This is transforming applications as well as the overall industry. This session will introduce Real Time Web Solutions and the virtual track at ITExpo 2017 focused on this hot topic.

This session will look across the tech landscape at the disruptive technologies that are increasing in prominence and speculate as to which will be most impactful for business communications – namely, AI and Cloud Computing. Curtis will highlight the current challenges of these transformative technologies and share strategies for preparing your organization for these changes. This “view from the top” will outline the latest trends and developments in AI and Cloud Computing technology innovation for enterprise communications to help you shape your future strategy.

People’s work styles vary. Now, more than ever, IT leaders are beginning to recognize that if they hope to attain strong adoption of communications technology in the enterprise, they need to understand and consider user behavior, device preference and work style. With this in mind, Plantronics conducted an in-depth, global study of 4,000+ participants, in an effort to understand evolving needs and pain points as they apply to communication and communication device technologies. This work identified distinct working styles or “personas.” This session will take you through each persona, and explain how matching specific needs of the individual to the right communications technologies, can help dramatically improve the overall efficiency and productivity of any workforce.

If you’re in sales and marketing, lead generation, call centers, or development, this is the workshop for you. Learn how to significantly increase your contact and close rates through programmatic blended communications that are: voice, SMS, voicemail, email, and direct mail. Experience increased conversions through improved conversations.

Every day, nearly every person, in every city, in every country is connecting to something or someone. We take these connections for granted, but should we in the digital world? The mobile identity is a powerful thing – and it seems simple and secure – but is it? The stakes are high with subscribers being defrauded of thousands and even a million dollars when that power gets into the wrong hands? How do we strive to ensure that a person’s identity is never compromised. Chris Drake, CTO, iconectiv, will discuss the power of the telephone number as an identity and provide insights and strategies for ensuring that this identity can be trusted as the gold standard for identifying and authenticating people in our digital economy.

Data is the new natural resource that is transforming industries and professions. Cognitive computing is redefining and re-imagining how we interact with data. To succeed in the Cognitive era, businesses must deliver applications that collect and mine oceans of data for actionable insights to gain a competitive edge. To enable this, a next-generation hybrid cloud infrastructure must connect data from all sources, including traditional enterprise systems as well as mobile data. This infrastructure must dynamically and economically deal with an explosion in data volume and it must deliver the computing power necessary to perform the analytics flexibly and with high performance.

The evolution of the Internet has revolutionized application and service delivery, management, and consumption. With the emergence of cloud computing, communication has taken yet another turn toward being ubiquitous, with cloud communications offering up new opportunities for businesses and providers alike to take business communications to the next level. By all estimates, the market has years of growth ahead of it, growing into the tens of billions of dollars by the next decade as it continues to revolutionize the way businesses function. This general session features cloud UC powerhouses who will address not only market growth and business innovation, but also how other trends, like the eventual emergence of 5G technologies, vendor consolidation, and security breaches are impacting the community as a whole.

New technologies like mobile devices and the cloud have given businesses the ability to rapidly adopt new business models. With rapid changes in business come rapid changes in the roles of people and technologies. A user’s identity, role and their workplace (location/device) will define their workspace that can consist of both traditional apps or new emerging cloud or mobile apps. Offering multiple services to meet the needs of unique users is a good thing, but delivering different experiences across those services is no longer acceptable. The experience needs to be seamless across scenarios, user groups and devices. This session will discuss the mindset shift that leaders must make in order to thrive within this digital disruption and share best practices that they can implement to ensure a seamless experience within their own businesses.

From Day 1, Microsoft has seen widespread adoption of its UC-focused solutions – OCS, Lync, Skype for Business – but too many businesses have failed to live up to expectations. Often, that can be a result of not have a well-planned implementation strategy in place. In order to maximize benefits and ROI, business leaders must consider variables such as, current environment and infrastructure, goals and future objectives, users’ needs, migration plan, and of course, an education agenda. Not only will consideration of the factors help you make an informed decision, it will ensure you have a well-designed plan for implementation that will guide you to success, rather than leaving you wishing you had your old system back. Panelists will discuss the challenges of Skype for Businesses and steps businesses can take to alleviate them, based on real-world experience.

Big data, cloud, analytics, contextual information, wearable tech, sensors, mobility, and WebRTC: together, these advances have created a perfect storm of technologies that are disrupting and transforming classic communications models and ecosystems. This session will provide an overview of this technological shift, including associated business and consumer communications impacts, and opportunities it may enable, complement or entirely transform.

For basic one-to-one voice or video calling solutions, WebRTC has proven to be a very powerful technology. Although WebRTC’s core functionality is to provide secure, real-time p2p media streaming, leveraging native platform features and server-side components brings up new communication capabilities for web and native mobile applications allowing for advanced multi-user use cases. This panel will discuss the architectural requirements for these evolving use cases, as well as examples of APIs and integrations for new WebRTC use cases, such as team collaboration, virtual classrooms, broadcasting, archiving and security.

We are in an app economy, a world driven both professionally and personally by apps. It’s a function of the processing power of today’s tablets and smartphones, which allow connectivity, productivity, and massive processing power in the palms of our hands. As a result, communications – specifically, real-time communications – is also moving to the mobile environment. The question becomes, what are these new applications, who do they target, how are they different from existing capabilities to the degree uses will want to adopt them, and how can they be monetized? These questions will all be answered by this panel of industry veterans.

Today’s availability of cloud communications platforms and open communications technologies including WebRTC, is making it much easier for developers of applications of all kinds to quickly embed real-time voice and video communications for their users. The rapid inclusion of these capabilities into general-purpose mobile messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and even within core mobile platforms such Apple’s iOS and Xiaomi’s version of the Android OS, is creating an expectation within consumer and business users that voice and video should always “just be there”. What does this mean for all other application developers? This session answers that, and many others that follow. Can developers simply rely on these general purpose platforms or will they lose application stickiness, user context, key analytics data and ultimately revenue by giving away this functionality to other platforms? How easy is it to embed communications? What needs to be provided behind a mobile communications API to truly support developers’ needs for easy, high-quality experiences for their users. What constraints does RTC add to more standard APIs? Where are the boundaries between what’s included within mobile SDKs versus what’s provided by the cloud in order for developers to deliver quality communications without having to worry about the details.

Much has been discussed about the future of communications, and why embedded communications has the potential to disrupt the market. To date, that disruption has not happened in force, but several out of the box use cases continue to make the case for a new communications future. This panel will discuss the current path of WebRTC and why its growth trajectory is likely to change, and what that change and new adoption curve will mean for the communications market and for businesses that adopt WebRTC.