Each year Enterprise Connect provides an overview of the latest developments in enterprise communications. This year’s conference, which took place in Orlando, Fla., drew more than 6,500 attendees and roughly 200 exhibitors.
What started as a niche industry trade show more than 27 years ago has evolved to become a major communications hub with brand name tech leaders such as Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft rolling out innovative solutions to improve customer engagement and make a lasting impact in the industry. We want to congratulate Beth Schultz and the No Jitter team on another successful conference!
Flowroute has had the opportunity to attend Enterprise Connect for several years now; however, this year we attended as part of the West Company. In the following video, West team members, Dalan Angelo, head of business development and Sascha Mehlhase, senior director of product management took to the show floor to discuss where the future of telecom is headed.
As Dalan and Sascha discussed, the cloud offers enterprises and their customers vast benefits including cost savings, access and control to new telecom functions and features, reliability to avoid network outages, as well as flexibility to scale solutions for future innovation. Additionally, as customer engagement preferences continue to change, vendors look to the cloud and other emerging technologies to innovate offerings and increase collaboration for their internal and external audiences.
In addition to Dalan’s and Sascha’s takeaways, below are three trends we observed over the span of the event.
AI Coming to Life
AWS, for example, announced the addition of significant AI capabilities to Amazon Connect that revolve around speech analytics. Updates include Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Translate. The company is hoping to get ahead other cloud-based contact centers by providing unique capabilities that can only be enabled by the unlimited storage and compute capacity of its existing public cloud infrastructure
Collaboration Tools Continue to Cultivate
Emerging workflow preferences are also driving innovations in collaboration including video and audio visual, which are less about the technology and more about empowering improved business workflows. For example, with Avaya adding huddle rooms to an as-a-service packaging model, companies can more readily “move ideas, not people.”
Voice is Back (For Good)
Remember the predictions that voice communication was going away? Based on the conversations at Enterprise Connect and the increasing number of players in the enterprise comms space, it has been solidified that this is not so. Further, new reporting following the show indicates that voice communication is the single application that spans corporations.
Lastly, Enterprise Connect brought into sharper focus what telco providers and vendors should be looking for as they innovate solutions for their customers and build relationships within the industry. Strong relationships and the roll out of automated features will be key for communications vendors and providers to stay competitive and elevate their offerings.
