Unified Communications is now a frontline service. If calls glitch, meetings freeze, or external calling goes down, your business feels it immediately. That is why 2026 is a good year to get out of the day-to-day firefighting and into service management events and enterprise connectivity conferences. This is where real learnings are being shared.
The events below are some of the most relevant service management events 2026 has to offer. Alongside key enterprise connectivity sessions and IT infrastructure conferences that matter for UC reliability.
You will notice a theme: the best events do not just talk about tools. They talk about incident culture, root cause discipline, practical observability, and how to keep collaboration services resilient at scale.
Related Articles:
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- Evaluating ITSM vs Observability Tools for UC: Which One Is Right For You?
SERVICE MANAGEMENT EVENTS
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Pink26 | February 16–19, 2026 | Las Vegas
Pink26 is one of the biggest, most established gatherings in the ITSM calendar. Organizers Pink Elephant position it as the “world’s #1 ITSM event” and a premier annual IT service management conference.
What you can expect: a heavy emphasis on operational excellence topics that map directly to UC reliability. These include major incident management, root cause analysis, and ITSM process management. The event program also spans adjacent practices like organizational change management, DevOps, and service desk effectiveness. This is where many UC issues either get solved quickly or get stuck.
Why it matters for UC and collaboration leaders: if your UC environment is business-critical, the value is not just “better tickets.” It is building repeatable processes that reduce repeat failures, speed up escalations, and prevent changes from breaking calling or meetings. Pink26 is a strong choice when your goal is to professionalize how UC incidents and changes are handled across teams.
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Service Desk & IT Support Show | May 13–14, 2026 | London
SITS is a practical, vendor-rich event that describes itself as Europe’s leading event for ITSM, service desk, and IT support professionals. It is also explicitly positioned as a hands-on show, with a large expo floor, sessions, and networking.
What you can expect: broad exposure to service desk and ITSM platforms and services, plus the chance to see how vendors talk about automation, ticket reduction, workflows, and self-service in 2026. The show highlights major ITSM brands (including ServiceNow, TOPdesk, HaloITSM and others) and frames itself around practical, implementable learning.
Why it matters for UC: UC incidents often land on the service desk first, even when root cause lives elsewhere. SITS is useful for teams trying to fix the “UC support experience” itself: improving intake, triage, routing, knowledge management, and fast resolution. If your UC support model is noisy, reactive, or hard to scale, this is one of the most relevant stops on the ITSM conferences 2026 circuit.
CONNECTIVITY EVENTS
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Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference |November 16–17, 2026 | London
For many organizations, UC reliability is ultimately an infrastructure and operations story. Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in London is built around that lens. Looking at infrastructure strategy, operations maturity, cloud planning, and the I&O leadership agenda.
What you can expect: a strategic view of where infrastructure and cloud operations are heading, with content designed for I&O leaders and peers. This is less about “which button to click” and more about operating models, investment priorities, and how to scale reliability across an increasingly complex estate.
Why it matters for UC: UC is one of the most visible workloads your infrastructure supports. If your goal is to align UC reliability with broader cloud and operations strategy, this belongs on your shortlist of infrastructure conferences 2026. It is particularly useful when you need to translate UC pain (call quality, outages, remote performance) into I&O language that wins funding and executive support.
Want to find out what analysts are saying about service management & connectivity? Check out our collated list of the definitive reports you need to read.
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Commsverse | June 24–25, 2026 | London
Commsverse is a purpose-built UC event with a strong Microsoft Teams focus, including Teams Phone and topics around enterprise voice.
What you can expect: content and conversations about Teams Phone, voice strategy, and connectivity choices such as Calling Plans, Operator Connect, and Direct Routing. It is the kind of event where you will hear how real enterprises approach telephony integration, rollout planning, and troubleshooting patterns.
Why it matters for connectivity-minded UC leaders: if your 2026 priorities include external calling reliability, carrier strategy, telephony architecture, or Teams voice rollout improvement, Commsverse is one of the more direct “learn from practitioners” options. For UC buyers, this is one of the most relevant UC networking events 2026 can offer, because the audience and content sit right on the UC-to-connectivity fault line.
OBSERVABILITY & MIDDLEWARE EVENTS
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ObservabilityCON | 2026 dates vary by city
ObservabilityCON is Grafana Labs’ flagship event. In 2026 it continues with “ObservabilityCON on the Road,” a one-day version delivered across multiple cities around the globe. Grafana describes it as a chance to learn through technical deep dives, demos, and community sessions.
What you can expect: hands-on content on dashboards, monitoring, troubleshooting workflows, and building a reliability culture. Observability is increasingly relevant to UC because call quality and collaboration performance often break across multiple layers: endpoint, Wi-Fi, WAN, cloud services, and external routes. Better observability helps you prove where the issue is, faster.
Why it matters for UC: even if your UC team does not “own observability,” your ability to diagnose and resolve collaboration issues depends on it. ObservabilityCON is a strong fit if your goal is to modernize performance management, reduce time-to-diagnosis, and build better dashboards and incident workflows that reflect real user experience.
Note: ObservabilityCON dates and cities can change as new stops are added. So far, the event will be making stops in Frankfurt, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, and Amsterdam.
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API World | September 1–3, 2026 (Santa Clara, CA) + September 8–10, 2026 (Online)
API World is positioned as the world’s largest vendor-neutral API conference and expo, and it focuses on the value of APIs as they sit at the intersection of AI, cloud, and data.
Last year’s event saw speakers from Vonage, Cisco, and SAP – so expect plenty of UC relevancy this year.
What you can expect: sessions and workshops on API strategy, integration patterns, and the practical realities of connecting systems at scale, alongside vendor demos and networking with technical leaders and architects.
Why it matters for UC: as enterprises try to make UC operations more “connected” (for example: syncing user lifecycle changes, automating service workflows, improving incident response, and connecting UC signals into service management), the API and integration layer becomes a reliability enabler, not just a developer concern. API World is a strong fit if your 2026 priorities include automation, workflow integration, and data flow across the tools that keep UC running.
A final tip for UC buyers
Treat these as scouting trips, not conference tourism.
Before you go, pick one UC reliability target you want to improve, such as external call failure rates, time-to-diagnosis, service desk ticket noise, or change-related outages. Then attend sessions and vendor demos with that goal in mind.
That focus turns a busy calendar of enterprise connectivity events into something more valuable: a shortlist of ideas, partners, and practices that make UC feel reliable again.
Want an immediate start to your Service Management & Connectivity learning? Check out our ultimate guide on the topic to get instant insights you can bring to the buying committee.
TL;DR
What are the best service management conferences in 2026?
If you want the short answer, start with Pink26 and SITS for core ITSM conferences 2026. Then layer in Gartner for infrastructure strategy, Commsverse for Teams calling and UC design, and ObservabilityCON for modern reliability culture.
