October 8, 2021
On No Jitter this week, my colleague Ryan Daily offers a good wrap-up of last week’s Enterprise Connect 2021 virtual event, highlighting four themes: what she calls “the voice renaissance,” hybrid work, unified platforms for communications and collaboration, and the need to empower all employees — not just knowledge workers — with communications technology. I definitely recommend reading the whole thing.
As Ryan notes at the end of her post, these themes will certainly carry over as we launch Enterprise Connect 2022, which happens less than six months from now, March 21-24, at the Gaylord Palms hotel in Orlando, Fla. As we prepare to launch the program for next March, I’m excited to share some additions and new elements we already have in the works.
We try to add a new track to the program every year, and for 2022 it’ll be on security. Everyone knows how critical security is and, as widely recognized, modern communications and collaboration systems create new challenges. And it’s not just the systems themselves, whether based on the enterprise premises or in the cloud. The modes of communication popularized during the pandemic create new issues both for security and compliance. And, of course, all of this runs over the core network infrastructure, which itself is a constant target. We’re planning a series of sessions to help you get up to speed on security and compliance from this variety of angles.
We’re also bringing back our strategic-technology conference-within-a-conference that looks at where the major technology streams are headed over the next three years. Communications & Collaboration 2025 will look at collaboration platforms, contact centers, video, cloud, and more; we’ll bring in the leading experts on these topics to help you get a realistic view of where these technologies are headed, and what you should be doing now to prepare.
As for hot topics on the program, contact centers is definitely where we’re seeing a ton of interest. We’re heading into the proverbial perfect storm for the contact center: The amount of innovation and the potential for business transformation has never been higher, and yet by some accounts 70% of enterprises still run on-premises contact centers — even though all the R&D is happening in the CCaaS space. It’s an incredibly rich vein to mine.
We’ll also be delving deeper into the whole issue of communications platforms as a service (CPaaS), which as I noted last week is becoming a major topic for Microsoft, among others. Although CPaaS has been around for a while, it has yet to realize its potential. At the March event, we’ll explore whether 2022 is the year you need to start paying serious attention if you haven’t already.
Those are just a few examples that have come up as we get set to roll out our conference program. Look for sessions, keynotes, general session panels, and more to be announced later this month and in early November. We know that so many of you are excited about getting together in person, and of course we are too. I hope you’ll watch this space, as well as No Jitter and the Enterprise Connect website, as we start unveiling what we have in store for March 21 – 24, 2022.
