What an exciting week at VoiceCon! NEC was able to demonstrate new solutions such as our UNIVERGE Sphericall for Hospitality (meeting a need for the small- and mid-market hoteliers available April 1) as well as our Interactive Terminal Suite for the DT300 and DT700 IP phones, which will be generally available this quarter.
Here are a few observations from VoiceCon this year.
1. This is the year of video. Every year VoiceCon has a “show within a show” and the focus this year was video. Almost every booth in the show had some form of video capabilities. Polycom showing a new video phone. NEC showed off the UC Collaboration solution. Every where you looked, was the “great video experiment” (according to IDC).
2. The contact center is back! We had several people come by the booth and ask about our contact center solutions (thanks Doug Hutchinson for your knowledge in this area). Over the past couple of years it seems contact centers was fading in the background as “unified communications” became the buzz word. But as people begin to understand that UC is a framework for adding components that enable business processes (an idea that Jeff Kane, NEC president, shared with several media/analysts/consultants and they all agreed), people are again looking at the contact center as one of those components.
3. SIP-trunking is extremely interesting to IT managers this year. Jeff Kane discussed this within NEC after chatting with one of our partners. I also heard this from Nemertes Research. Nemertes is publishing a report in early summer that highlights several initiatives for the year (they get their information directly from customer surveys) including on premise conferencing solutions (audio and web); mobile device management; and SIP-trunking.
4. Services, services and more services! This was the theme from almost every analyst and media person we spoke to at the show. From managed services to cloud/hosted offerings, Paul Lopez did a great job (and a big thanks to Pedro Marquinez also) of sharing the NEC vision for services.
There was much more, but this is a quick summary of a few key topics that were floating around the show and highlighted in sessions. Let me know if you have specific questions or would like more information on a given topic.
Thanks,
NEC Marketing
