As the telecommunications world prepares once again to converge on ITEXPO, which will be held from August 11 to 14 at the Rio in Las Vegas, it’s worth exploring some of the many topics that will be discussed at the world’s largest telecommunications and business technology event.
In advance of the conference, Webrtcworld took some time to speak with Phil Edholm, President and Principal of computing, networking, and communications consultant firm PKE Consulting.
Edholm noted that the telecom and technology industries are seeing some critical shifts, most notably in the areas of wearable computing (where he foresees wearable personal assistants in the cloud), the merger between the tablet and laptop computer industries (most notably with Microsoft’s Suface 3 Pro tablet) and mobile device strategy.
But where the “rubber meets the road” (so to speak) in innovation really comes with how organizations are communicating and collaborating, both internally and with their customers.
From an internal perspective, unified communications are enabling increasingly geographically dispersed employees to work together easily and more visually, particularly with the relative ease and low cost of the adoption strategy that Microsoft has taken with its Lync collaboration solution.
“This has led to a large adoption of Lync for IM/Presence as well as enabling of basic Lync to Lync voice and video as well as conferencing with the Enterprise CAL,” says Edholm. “It is a natural extension to enable Lync to be a PSTN interface and then to see a path to replacing the current PBX with Lync. This staged adoption strategy is both non-threatening and progressive in cost and investment,” he notes, since the Lync platform integrates well with the productivity tools most users use through Office and can be easily managed through administration interfaces.
For companies looking to improve communication and collaboration with their customers, WebRTC is becoming the buzzword of the year.
The standard allows for browser-to-browser voice and video communication that can be easily launched with no need to download anything on the customer’s part. Essentially, the customer or the agent can launch a video chat session right from a company’s Web site.
“The emergence of WebRTC as a viable option for many applications will be a huge change in 2015,” says Edholm. “In customer care, the integration of the web and the contact center through WebRTC will begin to have major impacts in key verticals like financial, healthcare and retail.”
For organizations still communicating with its employees and customers like it’s last decade, the needs are urgent to evolve.
Edholm will be presenting and moderating a number of sessions on the topic of WebRTC moderating as well as delivering an analyst’s view on what’s happening in the UC world and why.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
