Where there is chaos, there is money to be made when change forces clarity.
Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Florida this morning spawned the usual flurry of announcements from dozens of companies competing for mind share and business from the enterprise IT teams able to wrangle budget for travel and education to be able to attend this super show.
These are the very same enterprise IT teams who are now being forced to rethink everything from the death of desktop phones and PBX systems to the mind boggling number of options replacing legacy including cloud communications, unified communications as a service, collaboration platforms, omnichannel contact centers, mobility, security and applications, including those being created in-house raising the bar on DevOps.
The number of moving parts at this year’s conference? Unmatched in recent history (and we’ve been at our fair share of these conferences over the years!)
Enterprise Connect Technology Decision-Makers’ Experience This week
- Hundreds of companies now offering “Unified Communications as a Service” – real time communications delivered via the cloud; this includes AWS, a company that clearly sees voice, data, video and messaging as the next frontier after generally conquering cloud computing
- Dozens of companies are promoting their “Communications Platforms as a Service” including Twilio, Kandy, Nexmo, Sinch, Plivo and bringing APIs and SDKs to developers, luring them towards buying minutes and gigabytes in completely disruptive ways – “by the drop”
- Related, core communications capabilities including access to the PSTN, call control software and more are sprouting up everywhere even as we move to Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization – delaminating the layers and opening up the world, including through open source putting pressure on pricing through commoditization
- Impressive collaboration platform are embedding voice, data and video into workflow, including IBM Connections, Slack, Atassian HipChat/Jira, Jive, Google, Microsoft Teams and more…
- While mega enterprise platforms including Skype converge with Office 365, further decomposing and recomposing not only how end-users manage their work and productivity, and how their managers oversee that productivity, but how “omnichannel” messaging is being orchestrated and…
- Secured! With so many options for independently minded employees who often opt to use their own Dropbox accounts, for example, locking down corporate strategies, information and data is starting to feel like an impossible task, and is creating new opportunities and new categories around dealing with “shadow IT” and rogue teams who are very often comprised of many of the most creative individuals in a company
- Then there is a blur of real time communications into business apps, “embedded” voice for example, inside ERP, HR systems, CRM, and more; at some point we may not need “phone numbers” when we simply click to call colleagues to get questions answered quickly and get work done faster; Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, and all other systems integrators, ISVs and platform providers are heading firmly in this direction, further complicating the IT team’s decision making, budgeting and operational transformations
- Mobile plans are collapsing and being reinvented and moving towards a simplification of the end-user support model, providing profiles associated with mobile services, eliminating the need for desktop phones and therefore “UC” as we once knew it
With all this going on – and more – is there any real unification possible?
In the network – yes!
Regardless of the edge device, the application, the layers of application, the interop between applications, the embedding, the and general creative chaos – all this needs network.
The good news? With technologies like those NetFoundry has introduced recently, enterprise networking becomes SIMPLER and LESS RISKY. In other words, don’t miss us at Enterprise Connect.
Why?
Because we’ve figured out how enterprises can use the Internet and transform it into a platform for extremely secure, high performance networking “by the App”. We’ve created a network optimization and simplification platform that enables developers of other business applications to spin up networks for their apps, without having to deal with the complexity and cost associated with legacy private networking (MPLS, VPN, gig-E, private lines, etc.)
We’re partnering with companies like IBM to not only make it simpler to spin up private networks, by the drop and by the app (no capex required) but to also enable their Watson-powered apps to work better, including voice to text translation that feeds Watson’s big brain better audio quality and therefore clear voice streams to digest and analyze in nanoseconds.
For IBM and their voice gateway engineers, this means cognitive contact centers are no longer a “future vision” but an “immediate reality.” Simply put, end customers can buy the cognitive contact center solution without having to worry about the complexity and expense of having to provision a network to make it work! Instead, extremely secure, high quality of experience networks can be embedded as part of the solution, and consumed and paid for faster and more easily than ever.
No more months or years to sell a solution and wait for it to be provisioned. When network is simplified, applications are too.
Come see for yourself at Enterprise Connect as @gilzino and the NetFoundry team demonstrate spinning up networks with IBM Watson voice gateways in minutes, not hours, days or weeks. It’s as simple as spinning up a Virtual Machine, and carries the same benefits of simplicity – flexibility – and cost efficiency with it. We’re in the Tata Communications booth 1627. Tweet @gilzino or contact us and see simple in action, a breath of fresh air in the midst of chaos and change.
