Compunetix was in Florida last week to attend the growing 2017 Enterprise Connect Conference and Exposition held at the Gaylord Palms resort in Orlando, FL., March 27-30.
While our affiliate company, Sonexis, was hosting their own booth, members of the Communication Systems Division (CSD) walked the EC trade show floor and attended industry presentation sessions to talk with customers, gather emerging requirements, and get a sense of the enterprise deployments in the unified collaboration space.
While EC is an event dedicated to all aspects of enterprise computing; unified communications, conferencing and team collaboration were, without a doubt, the stars of the 3-day conference.
The keynote lineup card of Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Twilio tells you everything that you needed to know about this year’s version of the perennial event. At some points, it got so ‘cloudy’ that you might forget you were in sunny Florida. 🙂
Communication and collaboration clouds from each of the major software vendors, and the Twilio API cloud for tying them all together, dominated the bulk of the sessions and informed the conference overall. If there was one overriding theme it was that cloud deployment is the current favorable model. In general, the technical challenges are understood and the industry now needs to focus more on the end-user “experience.”
That said, a very impressive collection of new hardware and huddle room products were also on display. These ranged from the, always impressive, 85-inch Microsoft Surface Hub interactive display to the future-tech 3D virtual reality meeting spaces demonstrated in the Cisco booth.
Some takeaways from the event include:
- While there is still much debate, and some confusion over public, private and hybrid cloud deployments; there is general agreement that the world needs a complete spectrum to fill all requirements
- The technologies are good and powerful, but the end-user experience can still be less-than compelling
- The first phase of the cloud – to small and mediums sized organizations – was a rousing success. Time to move onto large enterprise
- One of the primary drivers of cloud based adoption is mobility
And while there were many new toys and services to play with and experience at the expo, what was the one tech most used by Compunetix personnel? It was our new Olympus HD Mobile application for smartphones, of course. CSD personnel utilized our own new app practically hourly to keep up with happenings in the office here in Monroeville, even while on the noisy show floor.