Greetings, enterprise communications decision-makers, industry experts, and lovers of fine things! As the General Manager of Enterprise Connect, I’d like to welcome you to the runup to EC Orlando 2018. As we prepare for our 28th edition of the show, which takes place March 12-15, 2018 at the Gaylord Palms hotel in Orlando, I’ll be posting weekly updates on how preparations are going, new stuff we’ll be trying on the program and show floor, reminders of upcoming deadlines for registration, and other newsworthy tidbits. I’ll also link to posts on our No Jitter editorial site, which is run by my program co-chair, Beth Schultz, with our program coordinator Michelle Burbick. No Jitter has daily blogs and analysis from leading independent industry analysts and consultants, many of whom also present sessions at Enterprise Connect.
PROGRAM IS JUST ABOUT COMPLETE
We’ve got all but a handful of our breakout sessions posted on the website. We’re trying to make our Conference Program page more useful by adding a feature that you can use to sort the sessions by Hot Topics as well as by the Conference Track that they’re in. The 9 Conference Tracks cover the biggest trends and issues—UC&C, Contact Centers, Video, etc.—while the Hot Topics are areas that didn’t warrant a whole track, but do appear throughout the program, often scattered across different Tracks. So for example, if you sort by the Hot Topic on Artificial Intelligence (AI), you’ll get a list of the sessions that address AI’s emerging role in communications and collaboration—some of those sessions might be in the Contact Center Track, others in our new Track on Speech Technologies, etc. Hopefully this feature will help you find topics, especially in the emerging tech area, that touch different aspects of enterprise communications in different ways. Let me know what you think - [email protected], @EricHKrapf .
MEET OUR ADVISORY BOARD
One of the things we’ve done to add our attendees’ voice to the planning process has been to create an Advisory Board made up of 8 individuals from enterprise communications/IT organizations. These folks have generously agreed to share their insights with our Program Committee on a quarterly basis, to help us deepen our understanding of trends in the industry, how their jobs are evolving, and what they’d like to see at the show. I want to express my gratitude here to these professionals for their willingness to help us out—they’re the kind of smart, wise, great people that make working on Enterprise Connect a pleasure.
ON NO JITTER
This week we’ve got a tremendous article by Elka Popova of Frost & Sullivan, How Cisco-BroadSoft Acquisition Impacts UCaaS Ecosystem, a really exhaustive, in-depth examination of one of the biggest acquisitions in our space in years, and one that bears directly on the transition to cloud/UCaaS that the industry is making. The piece is long, but I hope you can find the time to read it; it’s pretty much the definitive take on what Cisco-BroadSoft means for the industry and the companies involved.
The other thing on No Jitter that I’d like to call your attention to is the slideshow that Beth Schultz put together with the results of our recent Career/Salary survey. This is the third year we’ve surveyed enterprise communications professionals about their opinions on their jobs, and as always, the answers are enlightening. Check it out.