Enterprise Connect 2017, which UC Today was lucky enough to attend this year, highlighted a significant transition in the world of communications at an enterprise level, and potentially outlined a turning point for the industry. Sure, we've seen the changes coming, but now they're finally here.
The transition we're talking about is the final farewell to IP-PBX, and the beginning of the end for companies that depend on those services. Think of this change on the same level as the change that cell-phone technology had on landline phones. It's big. People still communicate from home phones, but the device businesses and legacy networks are fading into the past.
The Enterprise Connect Keynotes
The keynote speakers for Enterprise Connect this year were just one of the biggest symbols of the latest transition. This is the first time ever that not one of the keynotes was presented by a company that makes even a minimum of 10% of its revenue from IP-PBX. Rather, the keynote speakers were:
- Twilio: A Cloud company that makes revenue from communications infrastructure as a service, alongside communication platform as a service solutions.
- Amazon Web Services: A parent online retailer that started to offer conferencing technology recently to customers as part of its business-oriented portfolio
- Google: An advertising company that earns pretty much nothing from communication technology.
- Microsoft: An enterprise application and productivity software company that earns less than 5% of its revenue for on-premise Skype for Business solutions.
- Cisco: An enterprise IP company earning only 9% of its revenue from collaboration.
The Best of Enterprise Connect 2017 Award
Another sign of the transition for companies today, is represented by the finalist companies in the list for the Best of Enterprise Connect award. The top six were:
- BroadSoft: For BroadSoft Business
- Cisco - for the Spark Board, a high-def touchscreen whiteboard service with embedded video and audio.
- Genband: For the Kandy Smart Office 3.2 - a CPaaS service for a more personalised user experience that integrates business applications with communications.
- Plantronics: For the Plantronics Manager Pro - a cloud service that uses information from UC headsets to manage analytics and audio quality, among other things.
- Polycom: For the EagleEye Director 2 - a new audio-video Polycom system that applies advanced software solutions to the average meeting room.
- Vonage: For Nexmo - the Voice API CPaaS with integrations into advanced systems like Watson AI and speech recognition.
Check out the eventual winner of the Best of Enterprise Connect 2017.
