Collaboration Track
Enterprise communications is evolving from an emphasis on hardware and infrastructure to a focus on applications and integrating the communications function with business productivity applications. This in turn is changing the focus from communications as a standalone functionality, to an emphasis on how the enterprise enables collaboration. The Interop Collaboration track provides a grounding in the infrastructure issues that enterprises are dealing with today as part of their legacy environment, but the stronger emphasis is on the collaboration environment that enterprises are migrating toward. Sessions will look at the ways of integrating communications into business processes and enabling collaboration via new media such as video, and new outlets such as social media. Attendees will get a complete view of the challenges and opportunities around the migration from communications to collaboration in the enterprise.
| Tuesday, May 8 | |
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10:15 AM–11:15 AM Location: Room 5 Multivendor interoperability is a key part of any Unified Communications implementation. Few enterprises will get all of their UC infrastructure and applications from a single vendor. In addition, UC delivers value through integration with business processes, which requires interoperation with other software applications (e.g. document creation and management; for sales, services, logistics; et al.).
Vendors are addressing interoperation in varying degrees and at varying rates, depending on the markets they serve and on their cultures of openness vs. self-sufficiency. This session will help you understand how the vendors are positioning themselves with regard to interoperability, and how that should affect your planning. Moderator - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting 
Marty Parker is committed to advancement of Unified Communications (UC) to produce new benefits and efficiencies in enterprise communications and to stimulate and justify innovation in the business communications industry. Marty sees Unified Communications as transforming the highly manual, unmeasured, and relatively unpredictable world of telephony-based and e-mail-based communications into a software-assisted, coordinated, simplified, predictable process that will deliver high-value benefits to customers, to employees, and to the relevant enterprises. With even moderate attention to implementation and change management, UC can deliver the cost-saving and process-accelerating changes that deliver real, compelling, hard-dollar ROI.
Panelist - Hugh Finnan, Director of Product, Google Hugh has been working on online commerce and user experiences with video and multimedia technologies for nearly a decade. As a Product Director at Google, he is currently leads the strategic direction for overall Chrome Media offerings and services including audio and video within the web platform. Prior to Google, Hugh lead multiple launches of Kindle and its key features at Amazon.com. Before Amazon, he worked at Microsoft for 10 years developing the multiplayer infrastructure for PC games as well as various enterprise office products. | |
11:30 AM–12:30 PM Location: Room 5 Increasingly, voice and video communications can be embedded in applications that enterprise users work in throughout the day. This may consist of a plug-in or a presence indicator, from which the user can find and connect with those in their enterprise directory—and potentially even those outside the enterprise (where the two entities’ systems are federated). But are vendors really delivering on the potential of these “Communications Enabled Business Processes” (CEBP), and are enterprises ready to implement such integrations? In this session, you’ll learn how communications systems can be integrated with business applications; what the potential benefits of doing so might be for your enterprise; and how to go about implementing the integration. You’ll learn what it will take to transform this capability from a “nice to have” into a business-critical integration, and how to support these systems once they’re integrated. Moderator - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting
Marty Parker is committed to advancement of Unified Communications (UC) to produce new benefits and efficiencies in enterprise communications and to stimulate and justify innovation in the business communications industry. Marty sees Unified Communications as transforming the highly manual, unmeasured, and relatively unpredictable world of telephony-based and e-mail-based communications into a software-assisted, coordinated, simplified, predictable process that will deliver high-value benefits to customers, to employees, and to the relevant enterprises. With even moderate attention to implementation and change management, UC can deliver the cost-saving and process-accelerating changes that deliver real, compelling, hard-dollar ROI.
Panelist - Hugh Finnan, Director of Product, Google Hugh has been working on online commerce and user experiences with video and multimedia technologies for nearly a decade. As a Product Director at Google, he is currently leads the strategic direction for overall Chrome Media offerings and services including audio and video within the web platform. Prior to Google, Hugh lead multiple launches of Kindle and its key features at Amazon.com. Before Amazon, he worked at Microsoft for 10 years developing the multiplayer infrastructure for PC games as well as various enterprise office products. | |
2:30 PM–3:30 PM Location: Room 5 There are plenty of PBXs out there, but as a concept, the PBX—i.e., the voice-only switch—is dead. Emerging in its place is the concept of session management: A middleware platform that, like the PBX, centralizes and manages the establishment of communications among end users—but that, unlike the PBX, handles all media (voice, video and data), serving any endpoint and any application that the user might be on. The heart of Session Management is the SIP protocol, but SIP is being implemented in different ways by different vendors, complicating any enterprise’s attempt to unify its session management around a single middleware platform. In this breakout, you’ll learn how session management works, how (and whether) to migrate from PBXs to session management middleware, and how your decisions around session management limit or open up your options for empowering end user collaboration. Moderator - Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research 
Kerravala provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate and long term strategic advice. Kerravala provides research and advice to the following constituents: End user IT and network managers, vendors of IT hardware, software and services and the financial community looking to invest in the companies that he covers. | |
| Wednesday, May 9 | |
10:15 AM–11:15 AM Location: Room 5 In spite of all the hype about “BYOD,” desktop telephones will be the mainstay of many enterprise users for at least the near term—for many job descriptions, there’s simply no need for a change. However, for an increasing number of workers, mobiles and PC/tablet-based softphones are the wave of the future. Chances are, your enterprise will feature a mix of these types of users—traditional phone, PC softphone and mobile. So how do you determine who gets what kind of device? How do you manage and set policy for this multiplicity of devices? And how do you provide the best collaboration experience for the increasing number of users who use multiple types of devices (connecting over multiple types of networks) over the course of a single day? This session will present you with the trends and choices in each area of enterprise communications devices, and will offer a provocative discussion about what works best, and where to place your bets. Moderator - Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President & Founder, Nemertes Research  Robin Gareiss is Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research product development, conducts primary research, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. She serves as chief financial officer, as well. For the past 20 years, Robin has advised and worked with hundreds of senior IT executives, ranging in size from Fortune 100 to Fortune 2000, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. She also has developed industry-leading, interactive cost models for some of the world's largest enterprises and vendors. Robin is a widely recognized expert in Voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, advanced communications services, mobility, services, and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, presenting at IT Roadmap, VoiceCon, Citrix Synergy, AT&T Technical Leader Forums, Interop, Mobile Business Expo, Supercomm, Telecom, and CeBit. She also writes the IT Transformation column for No Jitter, and the Borderless Networks blog for Network World. Robin also has personal experience managing operations and developing new product offerings. Her entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and overseeing marketing and business development for The OnBoard Group, a water-purification business in Illinois. She also served as president of Living Hope Lutheran Church, and ran several successful fundraisers for children's cancer and other charities. Before joining Nemertes, Robin shaped technology and business coverage as Senior News Editor of InformationWeek, a leading business-technology publication with 440,000 readers. Prior to joining InformationWeek, Robin served in a variety of capacities at Data Communications magazine, where helped set strategic direction, oversaw reader surveys, and provided quantitative and statistical analysis. At these organizations Robin also helped develop, organize, and operate Web sites, TV, and print coverage of major trade shows. She has won numerous, prestigious awards for her in-depth analyses of business-technology issues. Robin also taught ethics at the Poynter Institute for Advanced Media Studies. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and American Medical News. Robin has a Bachelor of Science in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana. She lives in Illinois with her husband and four daughters. | |
11:30 AM–12:30 PM Location: Room 5 Offering video services in the cloud could potentially solve a lot of problems: Interoperability; latency; capital investment. But it remains an unproven model both for providers and customers. At the same time, the amount of ad hoc video within enterprise networks is growing: It’s being generated from consumer-grade systems such as Skype and Skype-supported Facebook video; and increasingly “home-based telepresence” is being enabled through game consoles such as Xbox/Kinect. Also, with the explosion of tablet usage, your wireless LAN may be carrying volumes of video traffic that you never anticipated when you deployed the WLAN.
This session will address two separate but equally challenging trends within enterprise video: Whether video as an application is ready to move into the cloud (and what kind of cloud—public, private, or hybrid); and whether you’re ready to deal with the impact that video traffic will have on your network. Moderator - Andy Howard, Howard Associates | |
2:00 PM–3:00 PM Location: Room 5 This session will look at video as a collaboration medium: Is it hype? Does anyone need to see the faces of colleagues that they know well and collaborate with regularly, often in person? How much does the quality of the video matter when considering video’s importance as a collaboration medium? In this session, experts will debate and dissect the factors that make video either succeed or fall short within enterprises. We’ll consider both room-based and desktop implementations, looking at the unique factors in each scenario, as well as evaluating whether or not one type of deployment is more effective than the other in certain collaborative situations. Moderator - Andy Howard, Howard Associates | |
| Thursday, May 10 | |
9:00 AM–10:00 AM Location: Room 5 New software offers enterprises the ability to monitor social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, to stay on top of public perceptions and mentions of their brands. Increasingly, enterprises want to integrate these social sites with their customer contact operations; they’d also like to be able use social networking sites as direct channels of communications into the contact center. In this session, we’ll examine how much progress is really being made toward this integration of social networks with enterprise customer contact. We’ll discuss what’s available to effect the integration of the systems, and what you can do with the information once it begins flowing into the customer care operation. You’ll come away with the essentials that will help you make customer contact via social networks a reality, and one that integrates seamlessly with your existing contact center operation. | |
10:15 AM–11:15 AM  Location: Room 5 Major software platform vendors have invested heavily in extending their enterprise footprints into the realm of collaboration and social computing. Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Connections, Cisco Quad, and Oracle WebCenter all represent attempts by those vendors to provide a broad suite of modern, "Enterprise 2.0" services within a single stack. Yet, these platforms differ significantly in scope, functionality, maturity, and cost. And while these stacks bring obvious integration benefits, business stakeholders have raised serious concerns about their functional inadequacies. Join a leading independent analyst from the Real Story Group in a vendor-neutral critique of the leading players, as well as an examination of the pros and cons of alternative solutions in the social and collaboration software marketplace. Moderator - Tony Byrne, President, Real Story Group  Tony Byrne is the President of the Real Story Group and oversees all of the technology streams and properties, which include CMS Watch, Enterprise Information Watch, and SharePoint Watch. In 2001, Tony founded CMS Watch as a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies and publishes research comparing different solutions head-to-head. Over time, CMS Watch evolved into a multi-channel research and advisory organization, spinning off similar product evaluation research in various areas of Enterprise Content Management. As a result of this natural evolution, in 2010, The Real Story Group became the parent company of CMS Watch and its sister entities, EI Watch and SharePoint Watch. Tony is the original author of The Real Story Group's Web Content Management research, a former journalist, and a 20-year technology industry veteran. Prior to 2001, he managed an engineering team at a systems integration firm. He now focuses his own research on Enterprise Community and Collaboration software, SharePoint, and Web Content Management. During the last decade, Tony has advised clients such as the US Dept. of the Treasury, the American Association of Retired Persons, MBC Television of Dubai, The Canadian Cancer Society, and The Seattle Children's Hospital. | |
