How Will Distributed Cloud Impact Communications?How Will Distributed Cloud Impact Communications?

Let me take you back in time to 2008, when serial entrepreneur and investor Charlie Giancarlo had briefly taken the reins at Avaya and was delivering a keynote at Enterprise Connect, under the show’s previous name, VoiceCon. Giancarlo was talking about the advantages of moving from TDM to IP voice, and he said something to the effect of, “Don’t worry, it’ll still be complicated, you’ll still have a job” — music to our IT audience’s ears.

Fast-forward: When UC as a service (UCaaS) emerged several years ago, some folks might have imagined that IT/communications professionals would find themselves out of a job as their enterprises moved to cloud-based telephony and UC. But it quickly became clear that migrating a PBX to a cloud-based service still left plenty of management and end-user service work for the IT/comms team. Now, several years into the cloud communications transition and the collaboration revolution, we’re looking at an even more complex services environment, with challenges (and maybe opportunities) that we could barely have imagined when UCaaS debuted.

If you want a stellar breakdown of exactly how this world of proliferating cloud services and challenges is developing, I strongly urge you to tune into a presentation that Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research will deliver next month at Enterprise Connect’s virtual event, Communications & Collaboration: 2024. Zeus builds his presentation around the progression of communications services from the original cloud vision, through multicloud (a concept most are familiar with), into the latest iteration, distributed cloud.

Distributed cloud isn’t a brand-new concept, but Zeus will offer a detailed, practical guide to understanding how this concept will impact enterprise communications, as well as the challenges it will pose. He’ll also talk about how to plan and redesign communications for distributed cloud.

I started off this piece with that Charlie Giancarlo anecdote because we’re clearly seeing the same progression toward complexity in cloud communications that we saw in IP-based comms more than a decade ago. And the result of increased complexity is increased job security for IT/comms professionals, as well as opportunities to build tech skills that tie you into broader IT trends.

Zeus’s presentation will be one the highlights of the upcoming virtual event for me. We called the event “Communications & Collaboration: 2024” because the aim is to help IT/comms professionals understand where today’s technology is headed over the next three years. Zeus’s presentation is a perfect example of what we are hoping to present, and what we’re hoping you’ll take away from the virtual event. Almost every communications team is dealing with cloud to some extent today, and in his presentation Zeus will give you a clear, compelling picture of where you’re likely to find yourself in three years as you try to determine how best to leverage the cloud for your enterprise.

I hope you can join us for Zeus’s presentation and the rest of the Communications & Collaboration:24 event March 9-10. You can see the full program here and register for free here. Hope to see you there!