Social networks like Twitter and Facebook represent an important emerging channel for enterprises to communicate with their customers, partners, and other stakeholders. And in many cases, these stakeholders will be talking about your enterprise in these forums whether you know it or not. So how does the enterprise harness the power of social networks, and also monitor them? In this session, leading experts will help you understand what tools are available for monitoring social networks and, more importantly, for bringing their input into the customer contact infrastructure you already have in place—and how you can act on what you learn through this channel. You’ll leave with specific best practices, products, and prospects for bringing the social media world into the contact center.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Is social media-contact center integration simply a matter of monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions of your enterprise? How do you turn these mentions into actionable intelligence?
* Should social media be a formal channel for interacting with contact center agents, or is it simply a source of data and ad hoc information?
* What analytics capabilities exist for your enterprise to quantify and act on the information you receive through social media channels?
* Is it really a good idea to encourage customers to contact your enterprise through social media? What are the potential pitfalls?
* Are any enterprises actually doing social media-contact center integration today, or is this more of a future prospect?

Contact centers have long used outsourcers to handle seasonal increases in demand, but these have typically been turnkey operations that provided agents, management and technology. More recently, vendors that specialize in contact center software have begun promoting the idea of cloud-sourcing just the technology portion, either in addition to or instead of the turnkey approach. Is the cloud the right place for your next ACD/contact center platform to reside? In this session, you’ll hear from industry experts who will help you understand the pros and cons of cloud-based contact centers, and you’ll come away knowing who the thought leaders and market movers are in this space.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* Why would you move your contact center application to the cloud?

* Are enterprises typically using cloud-based contact center software to supplement, or to replace, their existing on-prem implementations?

* Does moving the contact center to the cloud help an enterprise implement home-based agents, and how does this affect the larger staffing issues?

* How does cloud-sourcing the contact center affect handling of multimedia channels?

* How does cloud-sourcing affect the contact center’s use of social media?

Business are now asking for integration of desktop video solutions with group and telepresence systems. They are also asking for integration of video with the PBX and the UC core to enable video telephony and click-to-videoconference. In such systems, there are three possible call control centers: the enterprise PBX, the UC server, and the call control native to group video systems. This session discusses tradeoffs and strategies for integrating group video systems with telephony and with common UC environments.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How can we integrate and scale Lync video with group/telepresence viceo?
* What options exist for integrating group/telepresence with my existing Sametime deployment?
* Is it possible to have a fully integrated UC environment that includes voice, video, and unified call control?
* What tradeoffs do I have to make if I want Lync integrated with my PBX and with my group/telepresence video solutions?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

A consensus is emerging that most enterprises will implement some form of “hybrid cloud” that deploys communications functions in a mix of environments: public cloud (i.e., hosted); private cloud (i.e., the enterprise datacenter); and on-premises. The task will be to determine which communications capabilities should reside in which types of environments. This session will feature a discussion and debate among representatives of the various viewpoints and constituencies, who will offer their perspectives on why you should choose a particular mix of cloud and CPE deployments. You’ll leave the session with an idea of what’s possible now, and what direction you should take your planning for the next 12-18 months.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the risk/reward tradeoffs of deploying different communications functions in different parts of a “hybrid” deployment?
* Are all communications capabilities available for all types of environments (public cloud, private cloud and on-prem)? Do different types of providers specialize in different capabilities, and how does this factor influence your decision-making?
* What interoperability or integration challenges are you likely to encounter when you try to implement a hybrid cloud environment?
* What cost factors are involved in the decision-making? Considerations may include capex vs. opex; vendor incentive programs; product lifecycles and end-of-life; and how your own strategic technology plans fit with what’s available now and what’s on the horizon.
* Where do the risks of vendor lock-in reside in hybrid cloud implementations, and how do you avoid them?

As your enterprise plans its migration to SIP Trunks, you’ll need to understand the traffic effects of the voice (and potentially video) that will run on those connections. Since your planning is no longer circuit-based, you’ll have to figure out how peak-hour traffic demands translate into IP metrics. In this session, you’ll get both statistical and real-world information to help you make the calculations for sizing your SIP trunks. You’ll learn how to use traditional telephony metrics like Erlangs to calculate volumes, and then how to use this to calculate the traffic in terms of packet volumes—including allowances for packet overhead, codec differences, and the impact of video. Finally, after this discussion, you’ll learn about real-world cases that illustrate how these calculations were made, and how the enterprise’s traffic calculations meshed with the structure of the SIP Trunking carriers’ service provisions. You’ll come away with a framework for understanding how to “right-size” your SIP Trunks for your enterprise.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* How do you go from understanding your current traffic requirements for PRIs, to translating these metrics to IP/SIP Trunks?
* How do you purchase SIP Trunks while factoring in busy hour loads and sufficient quality of service?
* How do questions of SIP Trunk sizing vary depending on your network architecture—i.e., how do you size SIP Trunks at a centralized datacenter serving all your locations, versus an architecture with local SIP trunks at each location?
* How do you account for video traffic—current and future—in your SIP Trunk sizing?
* Are the carriers’ SIP Trunking services sold in a way that helps or hinders these calculations?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

Real-time traffic (voice and video) demands a network that delivers low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. And that’s not easy to accomplish. The dynamic character of modern networks, and the growing requirement for highly distributed configurations can lead to errors in design or implementation that cause quality problems for voice and video apps.

And so, a new breed of testing methodologies and tools is required to test or monitor converged networks and to isolate problems. This session will analyze and categorize these tools, and list vendors that provide the different kinds of solutions needed to manage today’s complex networks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Why are new tools required to support voice and video conferencing? Why can’t I use the tools that have been serving me well for years?
* What features are required in these tools for managing and monitoring real-time networks?
* Who are the vendors and what types of tools to they offer?

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook represent an important emerging channel for enterprises to communicate with their customers, partners, and other stakeholders. And in many cases, these stakeholders will be talking about your enterprise in these forums whether you know it or not. So how does the enterprise harness the power of social networks, and also monitor them? In this session, leading experts will help you understand what tools are available for monitoring social networks and, more importantly, for bringing their input into the customer contact infrastructure you already have in place—and how you can act on what you learn through this channel. You’ll leave with specific best practices, products, and prospects for bringing the social media world into the contact center.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Is social media-contact center integration simply a matter of monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions of your enterprise? How do you turn these mentions into actionable intelligence?
* Should social media be a formal channel for interacting with contact center agents, or is it simply a source of data and ad hoc information?
* What analytics capabilities exist for your enterprise to quantify and act on the information you receive through social media channels?
* Is it really a good idea to encourage customers to contact your enterprise through social media? What are the potential pitfalls?
* Are any enterprises actually doing social media-contact center integration today, or is this more of a future prospect?

Apple began shipping iPads in April 2010 and already these devices have become the most important new mobile computing platform in a generation. Sensing the potential, Avaya and Cisco have introduced their own tablet products, and virtually every other IP-PBX and UC supplier is developing tablet clients and figuring where tablets will fit in their overall product strategy.
In the meantime, the tablet market has split between 7-inch and 10-inch models, Android is starting to challenge Apple’s iOS with options like Amazon’s $200 Kindle Fire, HP has folded up the tent on WebOS, and Microsoft is waiting in the wings.
Smartphone-based mobile UC has met with limited user acceptance, so will UC on tablets be more of the same? Have the vendors figured out what users will need in a UC-capable tablet, or are they simply chasing the latest trend? Most importantly, with dozens of tablets appearing on the market, all of which use the same operating same operating systems, is there any additional value to be had from a branded table that we won’t get from a much cheaper general-purpose tablet device?
Find out what the we’ve learned about the tablet experience in the past year, what applications they are being used to serve, and what enterprise buyers should be looking for going forward.
Key Questions:
• With the wide range of tablets all of which are supporting the Android operating system, what additional value are we getting from a “branded” tablet from an IP-PBX or UC supplier?
• What requirements distinguish the enterprise tablet from the consumer tablet?
• What applications do you expect will drive tablet acceptance? Will “voice” be on that list?
• With 7-inch and 10-inch tablet options available, who’s buying what, and are there different applications or use cases that drive the buyer one way or the other?
• Is your next desk phone going to be a tablet?
• If the users do prefer commonality between the smartphone and the laptop, what happens to vendors who don’t have both options covered?

This session will here from several vendors who are working on new technologies, services, or solutions that may alter the fundamental way we use video and collaboration applications in the future.

KEY QUESTIONS

* What's coming down the pike that I need to know about?

* How will some of these new technologies or applications change the way I work?

* How will these new ideas save money?

* Will these new ideas disrupt the present market and vendors?

Why is unified communications and social software like a Reese’s peanut butter cup? They bring together two things that are great on their own and make them even better when they’re combined. Enterprises have been improving productivity and efficiency from using unified communications tools for the past few years, and more recently from enterprise-grade social software solutions developed for business collaboration. While these are both great business tools by themselves, their value dramatically increases when they’re integrated as part of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) solutions and used to solve business problems. The lines are blurring between the social aspects and the project-centric collaboration tools. Tying in UC’s presence, IM, and click to communicate capabilities with a company’s social software community makes it easier to connect with people and share information.

The use cases for UC and social software are endless, and we’re just at the beginning of seeing the power of these tools combined. Listen to early adopters who have been at the forefront of this new phase of UCC, and hear how they’ve integrated their various tools together to create business value and enhance the bottom line.

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

Unified Communications works perfectly within the enterprise, but even more value can be gained from inter-company UC – a feature known as ‘inter-domain federation’. Having full multi-modal, presence-driven communications access to key business partners could be an extremely powerful tool.

Unfortunately, the federation feature is not ubiquitously supported among UC vendors within their own implementation and inter-vendor UC federation is not available at all. This session addresses the benefits of federation as well as the challenges that federation presents as a next-generation communications mechanism.

Key Questions
• What is the current status of federation, and how is being used?
• What value does UC federation deliver, and how much of that value can be achieved today?
• What are the risks that come with deploying federation, and how they be mitigated?
• When will openly interoperable inter-vendor federation become a reality?
• Will communications service providers play a role in facilitating federation networks, or will it continue to be conducted direct from company to company over the Internet?

The SIP Forum has completed an interoperability specification, SIPConnect 1.1, which is intended to ensure interoperability between enterprise CPE and carrier networks. But the carriers never officially committed to SIPConnect 1.1, so it’s likely that interoperability will continue to be an issue when you investigate and procure SIP Trunking services. This session will give you the details about the status of SIP Trunking Interoperability today, and prospects for the future. You’ll understand what you need to do to make sure that interoperability challenges don’t hold up your migration to SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What interoperability issues have historically plagued SIP Trunking, and how close are these to being resolved?
* What is SIPConnect 1.1, and what are its prospects for emerging as a meaningful specification that’s adhered to by all parties involved in SIP Trunking?
* What specific interoperability issues aren’t solved by SIPConnect 1.1, and what is being done about these?
* Are some carriers more committed to interoperability than others? Are some vendors’ SBCs or gateways more likely to interoperate with more carriers?

All the key trends in communications and collaboration, from Unified Communications to the use of Social Networking tools , come together in modern contact centers. While traditional calling still dominates, most contact centers now operate with email and chat, some are beginning to incorporate video.
So, with all the new tools, systems and services available, what’s the state of contact center market? Which tools are actually being deployed and which are still in hype phase? And which vendors and solutions are winning and which are fading?
This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the dynamics in today’s contact center market and with the data you need to proceed to enhance, enlarge or migrate your contact center to the next plateau.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based?
• Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership?
• How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types?
• The trend toward contact center consolidation continues, but are more companies establishing contact centers? Is the overall market growing, shrinking or staying constant? And what does that mean in terms of the development of new products and services for the market?

Business are now asking for integration of desktop video solutions with group and telepresence systems. They are also asking for integration of video with the PBX and the UC core to enable video telephony and click-to-videoconference. In such systems, there are three possible call control centers: the enterprise PBX, the UC server, and the call control native to group video systems. This session discusses tradeoffs and strategies for integrating group video systems with telephony and with common UC environments.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How can we integrate and scale Lync video with group/telepresence viceo?
* What options exist for integrating group/telepresence with my existing Sametime deployment?
* Is it possible to have a fully integrated UC environment that includes voice, video, and unified call control?
* What tradeoffs do I have to make if I want Lync integrated with my PBX and with my group/telepresence video solutions?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

Telepresence will soon be in every living room, using that big HD screen and Internet connection that we already own. The simplicity of use and the quality delivered by these systems will soon have enterprise execs wondering why they can’t take that early morning call from Europe in their living room. And the CFO will be asking why the systems in the office cost 8X the systems at home.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What is the expected quality and feature set of home solutions?
* Will home solutions be expected to connect of conference rooms?
* How will home solutions change consumer behavior and expectations?
* How will home solutions change the conferencing manager's or IT manager's job?
* One year later, what happened to Cisco umi and what can we learn from it?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

We are all reeling from the ever increasing speed of business while our organizations struggle with a tough economy, aggressive competitors, fragile customer loyalty, and changing demographics. To help get the most out of Enterprise Connect, come talk with Avaya in the Market Leaders Theater about pragmatic approaches for helping your dispersed people collaborate faster and make smarter decisions to better serve customers and colleagues. Learn about practical adoption approaches for targeting the right users with the right capabilities, while building on the communications investments you already have today.

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

The vast majority of enterprises are still in pilots or early-stage deployments of SIP Trunks, but a few early adopters have migrated most or all of their wide area VOIP to SIP trunks. In this session, you’ll get a chance to hear from a panel of these end users. They’ll discuss their experiences, what worked, what didn’t, what they’d do differently, and what they plan to do when their next contract for SIP Trunks comes due. You’ll get real-world knowledge that you can put to use when you implement SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* What’s the biggest challenge when implementing SIP Trunks?

* Why did these panelists move so quickly to implement SIP Trunks?

* What have been the major benefits?

* What would they have done differently the first time around, and what do they plan to do differently as they move forward?

The market for IP Telephony systems and services continues to face challenges from the rough economy, but there’s a silver lining for buyers who can enjoy lower prices, increased system performance, and no/low interest financing as buying incentives.

Cisco continues to run strong in this market, which is also continuing to adjust to the absence of Nortel and competition abounds for that customer base. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Lync is making inroads, challenging traditional notions of architecture – and market leadership. And the trends towards Cloud-based communications, social networking and mobile communications each create new options for how enterprises communicate internally and externally.

This session will include updated telephony system market forecasts and supplier share estimates; a discussion of which enterprise communications system features and applications are hot and which are not; a review of major market trends, such as Cloud Computing and hosted solutions and virtualization; and a critical analysis of the leading system suppliers and their flagship offerings.

Key Questions:
• Which vendors are hot and which are not in the enterprise communications market?
• Are Cloud-based solutions taking business away from hardware equipment and software vendors?
• How are the traditional system suppliers adjusting to changing market conditions and who may not be around when the smoke clears?
• Are customers actually buying and implementing Unified Communications offerings or is it still all hype?
• Will tablets make desktop telephone instruments obsolete?

This session will here from several vendors who are working on new technologies, services, or solutions that may alter the fundamental way we use video and collaboration applications in the future.

KEY QUESTIONS

* What's coming down the pike that I need to know about?

* How will some of these new technologies or applications change the way I work?

* How will these new ideas save money?

* Will these new ideas disrupt the present market and vendors?

Unified Communications works perfectly within the enterprise, but even more value can be gained from inter-company UC – a feature known as ‘inter-domain federation’. Having full multi-modal, presence-driven communications access to key business partners could be an extremely powerful tool.

Unfortunately, the federation feature is not ubiquitously supported among UC vendors within their own implementation and inter-vendor UC federation is not available at all. This session addresses the benefits of federation as well as the challenges that federation presents as a next-generation communications mechanism.

Key Questions
• What is the current status of federation, and how is being used?
• What value does UC federation deliver, and how much of that value can be achieved today?
• What are the risks that come with deploying federation, and how they be mitigated?
• When will openly interoperable inter-vendor federation become a reality?
• Will communications service providers play a role in facilitating federation networks, or will it continue to be conducted direct from company to company over the Internet?

Migrating from individual legacy services and capabilities to integrated IP solutions creates an opportunity to bring communications tools together for increased business value. Productivity, virtualization, cost control and increased collaboration are just some of the business benefits customers are seeing from using SIP trunking, Unified Communications and an intelligent IP infrastructure to power their business. This session will cover the state of business, migration strategies and use cases on customer IP adoptions.

Smartphones are becoming the enterprise communications device of choice, and tablets are now poised to add yet another layer to the mobile melee. As users will no longer settle for the “standard corporate issued” mobile device, IT managers are coming to grips with the challenges involved in securing, managing and supporting an ever increasing range of mobile devices and operating systems.
This session is designed to help you understand the unique requirements of the mobile devices, bring the mobile O/S picture into a clearer focus, and identify the options available for supporting the mobile ecosystem.
Key Questions:
• Which mobile O/S environments will be most important to support, and are there differences in the level of security they can support?
• How far will companies be willing to go in allowing users to access enterprise data and applications on their personal mobile devices?
• Is the requirement to support multiple mobile O/S’s hindering organizations’ ability to mobilize line of business applications and spur real business transformation?
• Will the move to cloud based networks help or hinder the our ability to better integrate wired and wireless networks?
• What do IP-PBX and Mobile UC vendors have to do to deliver the type of compelling experience users have found in their consumer applications and will it be easier on some platforms than on others?

The RFP process for a selecting a new enterprise communica¬tions system has changed significantly during the past few years based on changing technologies, pricing models, system design and performance capabilities. New ‘Cloud-based’ offerings as well as those from Unified Communications vendors have dramatically changed the landscape.

The primary objectives of this workshop are to help customers prepare and write their own RFP document and to acquaint them with currently available system offerings from leading suppliers. This workshop has been synchronized with the UC and Cloud workshops so that a similar set of requirements is being used for all three sessions.

Key take-aways for this workshop are:
• A comprehensive RFP system performance document covering basic and advanced hardware/software capabilities for current IP telephony and Unified Communications systems. The RFP will also include:
o Use of SIP
o Integration of mobile devices
o Basic Contact Center
• Actual proposals from leading system suppliers with detailed performance specifications and associated summary pricing tables.
• Critiques of response submissions by one of the industry’s leading enterprise communications system analysts and end user consultants.
•Scoring of vendor responses based on TCO and ability to meet the RFP requirements

What’s the true state of communications security in 2012? Where are the most serious threats, and what is – and what isn’t -- being done to stop them? In this session, you’ll hear from leading experts, who will offer their real-world findings drawn from documented and observed operational attacks against U.S. enterprises and their contact centers, to give you a sense of what sorts of attacks pose the greatest risk to your communications, and which are still, at this stage, more distant prospects. You’ll come away with an understanding of what threats to fixed and mobile communications should concern you most, and how to tackle them working in conjunction with your enterprise’s security team and the vendor community.

Telepresence will soon be in every living room, using that big HD screen and Internet connection that we already own. The simplicity of use and the quality delivered by these systems will soon have enterprise execs wondering why they can’t take that early morning call from Europe in their living room. And the CFO will be asking why the systems in the office cost 8X the systems at home.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What is the expected quality and feature set of home solutions?
* Will home solutions be expected to connect of conference rooms?
* How will home solutions change consumer behavior and expectations?
* How will home solutions change the conferencing manager's or IT manager's job?
* One year later, what happened to Cisco umi and what can we learn from it?

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

Business are now asking for integration of desktop video solutions with group and telepresence systems. They are also asking for integration of video with the PBX and the UC core to enable video telephony and click-to-videoconference. In such systems, there are three possible call control centers: the enterprise PBX, the UC server, and the call control native to group video systems. This session discusses tradeoffs and strategies for integrating group video systems with telephony and with common UC environments.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How can we integrate and scale Lync video with group/telepresence viceo?
* What options exist for integrating group/telepresence with my existing Sametime deployment?
* Is it possible to have a fully integrated UC environment that includes voice, video, and unified call control?
* What tradeoffs do I have to make if I want Lync integrated with my PBX and with my group/telepresence video solutions?

If videoconferencing were simple, we wouldn't need these sessions. Several customers will describe what their motives were for deploying these solutions, what hosted, managed, or CPE strategies they followed, and what the challenges and rewards have been.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What strategy options are available to the end user in deploying telepresence and videoconferencing?
* What challenges have been overcome?
* What are the benefits?
* What would the customer do differently if doing it all over again?

This session will here from several vendors who are working on new technologies, services, or solutions that may alter the fundamental way we use video and collaboration applications in the future.

KEY QUESTIONS

* What's coming down the pike that I need to know about?

* How will some of these new technologies or applications change the way I work?

* How will these new ideas save money?

* Will these new ideas disrupt the present market and vendors?

Business are now asking for integration of desktop video solutions with group and telepresence systems. They are also asking for integration of video with the PBX and the UC core to enable video telephony and click-to-videoconference. In such systems, there are three possible call control centers: the enterprise PBX, the UC server, and the call control native to group video systems. This session discusses tradeoffs and strategies for integrating group video systems with telephony and with common UC environments.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How can we integrate and scale Lync video with group/telepresence viceo?
* What options exist for integrating group/telepresence with my existing Sametime deployment?
* Is it possible to have a fully integrated UC environment that includes voice, video, and unified call control?
* What tradeoffs do I have to make if I want Lync integrated with my PBX and with my group/telepresence video solutions?

Telepresence will soon be in every living room, using that big HD screen and Internet connection that we already own. The simplicity of use and the quality delivered by these systems will soon have enterprise execs wondering why they can’t take that early morning call from Europe in their living room. And the CFO will be asking why the systems in the office cost 8X the systems at home.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What is the expected quality and feature set of home solutions?
* Will home solutions be expected to connect of conference rooms?
* How will home solutions change consumer behavior and expectations?
* How will home solutions change the conferencing manager's or IT manager's job?
* One year later, what happened to Cisco umi and what can we learn from it?

Five years ago video conferencing standards were clear, and the top 5 vendors worked hard at maintaining interoperability. The vendor landscape has now changed dramatically -- enterprises want UC- video integration, consumer-oriented desktops, TV-based services are being introduced and Skype carries more video conferencing minutes than anyone, using a proprietary protocol. We now have many more options, and they don’t interoperate. How does an enterprise make an intelligent decision about video conferencing in today’s market?

KEY QUESTIONS
* Which vendors are supporting which video protocols and standards today?
* How and when will consumer video solutions interoperate with the Enterprise?
* What is the status of inter-company video conferencing?
* Many vendors offer gateways to other protocols, why isn’t this sufficient?

If videoconferencing were simple, we wouldn't need these sessions. Several customers will describe what their motives were for deploying these solutions, what hosted, managed, or CPE strategies they followed, and what the challenges and rewards have been.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What strategy options are available to the end user in deploying telepresence and videoconferencing?
* What challenges have been overcome?
* What are the benefits?
* What would the customer do differently if doing it all over again?

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

Video solutions have been extended from the telepresence suite to the conference room, enterprise desktop and, now, to mobile tablets and smartphones. Will this trend finally make video calling ubiquitous? Will the impact be technical or social, or will there be no real impact? A short presentation will layout the issues and be followed by a panel discussing the impact of mobility on video.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the vendor's perspective?
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the customer's perspective?
* What should a customer look for when considering a mobile video solution?
* Which of the current solutions is ready for prime time in the enterprise?

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

Contact centers have long used outsourcers to handle seasonal increases in demand, but these have typically been turnkey operations that provided agents, management and technology. More recently, vendors that specialize in contact center software have begun promoting the idea of cloud-sourcing just the technology portion, either in addition to or instead of the turnkey approach. Is the cloud the right place for your next ACD/contact center platform to reside? In this session, you’ll hear from industry experts who will help you understand the pros and cons of cloud-based contact centers, and you’ll come away knowing who the thought leaders and market movers are in this space.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* Why would you move your contact center application to the cloud?

* Are enterprises typically using cloud-based contact center software to supplement, or to replace, their existing on-prem implementations?

* Does moving the contact center to the cloud help an enterprise implement home-based agents, and how does this affect the larger staffing issues?

* How does cloud-sourcing the contact center affect handling of multimedia channels?

* How does cloud-sourcing affect the contact center’s use of social media?

The SIP Forum has completed an interoperability specification, SIPConnect 1.1, which is intended to ensure interoperability between enterprise CPE and carrier networks. But the carriers never officially committed to SIPConnect 1.1, so it’s likely that interoperability will continue to be an issue when you investigate and procure SIP Trunking services. This session will give you the details about the status of SIP Trunking Interoperability today, and prospects for the future. You’ll understand what you need to do to make sure that interoperability challenges don’t hold up your migration to SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What interoperability issues have historically plagued SIP Trunking, and how close are these to being resolved?
* What is SIPConnect 1.1, and what are its prospects for emerging as a meaningful specification that’s adhered to by all parties involved in SIP Trunking?
* What specific interoperability issues aren’t solved by SIPConnect 1.1, and what is being done about these?
* Are some carriers more committed to interoperability than others? Are some vendors’ SBCs or gateways more likely to interoperate with more carriers?

With click-to-call and Skype, not to mention softphones, computers have been used for voice communications for quite some time. But all the approaches deployed to date have been proprietary, and none come built into the most ubiquitous computer-based tool: the browser. But that’s about to change, as the standards-bodies and browser providers, notably Google and Mozilla, push to make the browser a key element in the communications experience.

This session will examine the technical approaches and provide an update on the standard-bodies’ deliberations. This is a critically important issue, that has the potential to alter the UC landscape and change our expectations for web-based communications.

Key Questions
• Is the technology for voice-enabled web browsers ready for prime time within the enterprise?
• What is likely to emerge from the standards groups? Will browser providers wait until standards are complete?
• What capabilities will voice-enabled browsers deliver?
• If an enterprise migrates toward voice-enabled browsers, what changes in the communications cost structure?
• Can voice-enabled browsers deliver the level of security and manageability enterprise require?

Real-time traffic (voice and video) demands a network that delivers low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. And that’s not easy to accomplish. The dynamic character of modern networks, and the growing requirement for highly distributed configurations can lead to errors in design or implementation that cause quality problems for voice and video apps.

And so, a new breed of testing methodologies and tools is required to test or monitor converged networks and to isolate problems. This session will analyze and categorize these tools, and list vendors that provide the different kinds of solutions needed to manage today’s complex networks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Why are new tools required to support voice and video conferencing? Why can’t I use the tools that have been serving me well for years?
* What features are required in these tools for managing and monitoring real-time networks?
* Who are the vendors and what types of tools to they offer?

With click-to-call and Skype, not to mention softphones, computers have been used for voice communications for quite some time. But all the approaches deployed to date have been proprietary, and none come built into the most ubiquitous computer-based tool: the browser. But that’s about to change, as the standards-bodies and browser providers, notably Google and Mozilla, push to make the browser a key element in the communications experience.

This session will examine the technical approaches and provide an update on the standard-bodies’ deliberations. This is a critically important issue, that has the potential to alter the UC landscape and change our expectations for web-based communications.

Key Questions
• Is the technology for voice-enabled web browsers ready for prime time within the enterprise?
• What is likely to emerge from the standards groups? Will browser providers wait until standards are complete?
• What capabilities will voice-enabled browsers deliver?
• If an enterprise migrates toward voice-enabled browsers, what changes in the communications cost structure?
• Can voice-enabled browsers deliver the level of security and manageability enterprise require?

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook represent an important emerging channel for enterprises to communicate with their customers, partners, and other stakeholders. And in many cases, these stakeholders will be talking about your enterprise in these forums whether you know it or not. So how does the enterprise harness the power of social networks, and also monitor them? In this session, leading experts will help you understand what tools are available for monitoring social networks and, more importantly, for bringing their input into the customer contact infrastructure you already have in place—and how you can act on what you learn through this channel. You’ll leave with specific best practices, products, and prospects for bringing the social media world into the contact center.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Is social media-contact center integration simply a matter of monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions of your enterprise? How do you turn these mentions into actionable intelligence?
* Should social media be a formal channel for interacting with contact center agents, or is it simply a source of data and ad hoc information?
* What analytics capabilities exist for your enterprise to quantify and act on the information you receive through social media channels?
* Is it really a good idea to encourage customers to contact your enterprise through social media? What are the potential pitfalls?
* Are any enterprises actually doing social media-contact center integration today, or is this more of a future prospect?

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

It’s no longer where you work, but how you work, and IT organizations are being forced to think smarter about the experience of the End User. Is your infrastructure agile and ready to accept the workplace of tomorrow? Learn how clients across all industries are ready for whatever device or app is next, and creating a real Unified Communication & Collaboration environment.

If you haven’t already made the transition from legacy phone systems to IP-based communications and are wondering where and how to get started, please join us for a fast-paced session covering migration best practices. Examine how this first step lays the foundation for additional collaborative capabilities that reduce costs and meet the demands of today’s workforce. An expert from Cisco’s Advanced Services team will share practical advice on field-tested deployment approaches and recommended next steps for moving your business to the next level of productivity and operational efficiency.

Mobility is becoming a key driver in enterprise communications architecture and services. Mobile technologies can spur individual user productivity and accessibility and they have the potential to spawn total business transformation as we have seen in industries like industries – from package delivery and health care.

At the same time mobility-related expenses have been the fastest-growing line item in enterprise telecom budgets, and wireless costs will continue to rise as smartphones and tablets replace more traditional desktop phones and PCs. Further, there’s growing pressure on IT departments to support a wider range of mobile devices or to allow users to “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device, but IT still needs to be able to secure, manage and support them.

In this session we’ll hear from leading mobility and UC suppliers, see what developments they are watching, and explore what’s next for the mobile enterprise.

KEY QUESTIONS
• UC suppliers are interested in mobility, but are mobility equipment and service providers interested in UC?
• Why hasn’t there been more market acceptance of Wi-Fi voice, dual mode FMC, mobile UC clients, and the other mobility options that have been tried thus far? Has anything changed?
• The mobility industry is focused on the consumer market, so what will it take to get them to deliver products and services that offer the same type of compelling user experience we have seen in the consumer market, but that respond to enterprise requirements for security, high availability and integration with the wired UC offerings?
• Will the service providers’ push for “walled gardens” choke the promise wireless has for both enterprises and consumers?
• What are prospects for the new Microsoft-Skype team in the enterprise? How about Google?

IT managers are facing increasing challenges as organizations look to capitalize on the mobility revolution. Mobile operators are deploying 4G network services that promise to offer wireline-like performance and reliability, but they are also eliminating unlimited pricing plans for those services. Users are demanding a wider selection of mobile device or the ability to bring their own personal mobiles to work, fundamentally altering the security picture for IT managers. Line of business managers are looking to mobilize more applications, but those efforts are being stymied by the range of devices, both smartphones and tablets, those apps will need to run on. At the same time, CFOs are watching mobile expenses skyrocket raising the need to focus on wireless expense management and rate plan optimization.
This program is designed to bring IT and mobility managers up to speed on the major issues involved in enterprise mobility today, and to discuss current best practices in addressing each of these areas.
The workshop will give you the tools you need to understand the major drivers in the mobility market, the challenges involved, and develop a sound mobility policy for mobile device management, security, and lifecycle management plan that protects their organization while enabling the implementation of mobile applications that can optimize business processes and spur business transformation.
Key Questions:
• Why now? Mobility isn’t new, so what’s really driving the need for an enterprise mobility strategy?
• What’s the role of IT in developing an enterprise mobility strategy – participant vs. leadership?
• Does adopting a BYOD strategy mean that my enterprise has given up on protecting corporate information assets?
• How do we integrate the mobile device with the wired network and extend UC to the mobile?
• How much control can an enterprise really exercise when it comes to mobility?

Smartphones are becoming the enterprise communications device of choice, and tablets are now poised to add yet another layer to the mobile melee. As users will no longer settle for the “standard corporate issued” mobile device, IT managers are coming to grips with the challenges involved in securing, managing and supporting an ever increasing range of mobile devices and operating systems.
This session is designed to help you understand the unique requirements of the mobile devices, bring the mobile O/S picture into a clearer focus, and identify the options available for supporting the mobile ecosystem.
Key Questions:
• Which mobile O/S environments will be most important to support, and are there differences in the level of security they can support?
• How far will companies be willing to go in allowing users to access enterprise data and applications on their personal mobile devices?
• Is the requirement to support multiple mobile O/S’s hindering organizations’ ability to mobilize line of business applications and spur real business transformation?
• Will the move to cloud based networks help or hinder the our ability to better integrate wired and wireless networks?
• What do IP-PBX and Mobile UC vendors have to do to deliver the type of compelling experience users have found in their consumer applications and will it be easier on some platforms than on others?

The time when “mobility” meant everyone gets a BlackBerry device supported on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) is long gone, and replaced with a world where users expect to be able to use any device (even their own) and get access to all of the same sensitive corporate data that they did before. However, IT managers are still responsible for ensuring that corporate data assets are protected and that their organizations can take the best advantage of this new wave of mobile technologies.

Should users be allowed to bring their own devices into the enterprise and are we taking risks in allowing them to access and store sensitive data? Can that data be protected if the device is lost or stolen? If the user is bringing their own device should they have to support the full cost, and if the company provides a stipend how big should it be? Does moving to user-owned devices absolve the IT department of providing and help desk support for them?

This session will introduce you to the major issues that must be addressed in a mobility policy, the best practices for supporting BYOD initiatives, and provide a template for developing (or updating) your organization’s mobility policy.

Key Questions

• Which BYOD policies work, and which don’t?
• What are the most important steps to take to protect corporate information assets in a BYOD world?
• Do customers save money with BYOD policies or not?
• Which mobile operating systems offer the most support for BYOD policies?
• What level of training do help desk personnel require when moving to BYOD?

Apple began shipping iPads in April 2010 and already these devices have become the most important new mobile computing platform in a generation. Sensing the potential, Avaya and Cisco have introduced their own tablet products, and virtually every other IP-PBX and UC supplier is developing tablet clients and figuring where tablets will fit in their overall product strategy.
In the meantime, the tablet market has split between 7-inch and 10-inch models, Android is starting to challenge Apple’s iOS with options like Amazon’s $200 Kindle Fire, HP has folded up the tent on WebOS, and Microsoft is waiting in the wings.
Smartphone-based mobile UC has met with limited user acceptance, so will UC on tablets be more of the same? Have the vendors figured out what users will need in a UC-capable tablet, or are they simply chasing the latest trend? Most importantly, with dozens of tablets appearing on the market, all of which use the same operating same operating systems, is there any additional value to be had from a branded table that we won’t get from a much cheaper general-purpose tablet device?
Find out what the we’ve learned about the tablet experience in the past year, what applications they are being used to serve, and what enterprise buyers should be looking for going forward.
Key Questions:
• With the wide range of tablets all of which are supporting the Android operating system, what additional value are we getting from a “branded” tablet from an IP-PBX or UC supplier?
• What requirements distinguish the enterprise tablet from the consumer tablet?
• What applications do you expect will drive tablet acceptance? Will “voice” be on that list?
• With 7-inch and 10-inch tablet options available, who’s buying what, and are there different applications or use cases that drive the buyer one way or the other?
• Is your next desk phone going to be a tablet?
• If the users do prefer commonality between the smartphone and the laptop, what happens to vendors who don’t have both options covered?

Everyone talks about the mobile empowered enterprise, but we are going to talk to some companies who have taken that message to heart. We have surveyed the community and found a number of enterprises with creative mobile applications that meet business needs and generate real ROI.
Join us for these enlightening presentations and get the opportunity to talk with the people who have deployed mobile applications, discover the challenges they faced, and learn what it will take to bring mobile business transformation into your organization.
Key Questions
• What were the driving factors for developing these apps – cost control, revenue generation, productivity improvement, customer satisfaction?
• What were the biggest “gotchas” in these projects?
• Who did the development – in house IT or contractors?
• How much training and support have end users required?

The explosion in wireless and the desire for the latest and greatest smartphone or tablet has made “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device – all the rage. But BYOD is just the latest example of how the “Consumerization” of IT is changing user behavior as well as corporate policies about what can attach to and be sent over the network.

In this Summit, we’ll discuss the steps you can realistically take to influence user choices in mobile device usage, application deployment and the use of social networking. Can you issue outright bans on specific gear and apps and, if you try, how do you enforce such policies? We’ll also discuss the best strategies for living with user-driven technology adoption; and we’ll even try to find ways that you can leverage such adoption to the business’s benefit, and encourage responsible trialing and use of emerging technologies by the user base. You’ll come away with the elements of a strategy for setting and enforcing policies, and accommodating user choice wherever possible.

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This workshop will take a unique look at SIP, how it works, and the major issues impacting deployments.

With a big focus on SIP interoperability issues, the session will show how SIP works along the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing, and connecting SIP across the PSTN. SIP trunking deployment options and Session Border Controllers will have an extra focus with discussion on NAT, Security, QoS, Codecs, Traffic Normalization and more. Enterprises need to understand how to get service into their networks and manage their voice traffic whilst negotiating around Interop issues. Attendance of this session will help smooth the path to a SIP based network.

Attendees will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers, organizations and discount vouchers for additional training.

In the current economic climate, business cases rule. Whether your enterprise is early in its migration to IP Telephony or , further along and evaluating how to deploy Unified Communications, it's not easy to build a credible case. IP Telephony and, in particular, Unified Communications, are complex and involve numerous technologies, decision-makers and equipment, software and service providers. This Deep Dive session will share business cases for both IP Telephony and Unified Communications, based on IP Telephony cost data gathered over the past several years from more than 800 companies that have implemented the technology. It will draw on real-world data from hundreds of IT decision makers on the newer Unified Communications products and technologies.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• What are the key metrics in a business case for IP Telephony and Unified Communications?

• What does it really cost to implement IP Telephony? What are the cost components of a Unified Communications business case?

• What resources (internal and external) companies must devote to their VOIP and Unified Communications rollouts, per end-unit, per year segmented by rollout size and vendor?

• What are some of the key pitfalls? Where did companies go wrong?

• What are some compelling business case models for both IP Telephony and Unified Communications?

As Unified Communications technologies mature and integrate more tightly with the rest of the enterprise infrastructure, the tools for managing UC also mature, and offer increased opportunities to automate processes that used to be done manually by telecom/IT staff. Automating the provisioning and management systems has obvious benefits in terms of cost savings and increased ease of use for the end user. So where do we stand with the move towards greater automation in provisioning and management? In this session, you’ll hear real-world users describe their automated management processes and how they were able to achieve savings and greater user satisfaction. You’ll come away with specific steps you can take to emulate their success.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What management and provisioning processes can you automate for UC today? What’s in the future?
* What must be the state of your underlying UC deployment and your infrastructure generally in order to support automated UC management?
* What configuration processes can be converted to self-service for the end user? Which ones shouldn’t be?
* What interoperability and integration issues exist when you’re trying to automate the management of your UC systems?

Outsourcing has been around for a long time, and it’s become a routine part of technology implementation. It has neither “taken over” and put IT out of business, as early predictions warned, nor has it gone away. Instead, it’s one option on a menu of choices for any given technology or process. So given that outsourcing is a part of doing business, how do you define hard metrics for understanding when it’s likely to succeed for a given enterprise technology need? And how to you measure the success of a particular outsourcing project in the enterprise communications world? In this session, a consulting firm with deep understanding of outsourcing success and failure factors will share its knowledge with you. You’ll come away with a set of specific, defined criteria that will let you have clearer visibility on whether outsourcing a particular function is likely to succeed, or whether a given outsourcing project has met its goals.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* How has outsourcing changed over the past several years? What’s likely to be the scope of an outsourced project today in communications, and what entities will compete for the job?
* What communications functions are the best candidates for outsourcing today, and how do you determine whether outsourcing is the right choice in these areas for your enterprise?
* What are the specific metrics or criteria that you should establish in order to get a clear sense of the success or prospective success of an outsourcing proposal?
* How do the various forms of outsourcing—from managed services to hosted infrastructure to turnkey outsourcing—differ in today’s environment, and how do they match up with the needs your enterprise may have?

All the key trends in communications and collaboration, from Unified Communications to the use of Social Networking tools , come together in modern contact centers. While traditional calling still dominates, most contact centers now operate with email and chat, some are beginning to incorporate video.
So, with all the new tools, systems and services available, what’s the state of contact center market? Which tools are actually being deployed and which are still in hype phase? And which vendors and solutions are winning and which are fading?
This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the dynamics in today’s contact center market and with the data you need to proceed to enhance, enlarge or migrate your contact center to the next plateau.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based?
• Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership?
• How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types?
• The trend toward contact center consolidation continues, but are more companies establishing contact centers? Is the overall market growing, shrinking or staying constant? And what does that mean in terms of the development of new products and services for the market?

As customer engagement becomes increasingly complex, the allure of cloud-based contact centers grows. Beyond reductions in Total Cost of Ownership, cloud-based contact centers often provide better ways of scaling up for seasonal peaks, integrating social media and cost-effectively mirroring ‘enterprise’ functionality across multiple sites. But a wholesale move into the cloud may not be for everyone. In this session we will deal with the technology, the ownership experience of cloud, premise and hybrid contact centers; offer tips to help you decide what makes sense for your business – and address the most strategic of questions: Should your contact center be in the cloud?

The RFP process for a selecting a new enterprise communica¬tions system has changed significantly during the past few years based on changing technologies, pricing models, system design and performance capabilities. New ‘Cloud-based’ offerings as well as those from Unified Communications vendors have dramatically changed the landscape.

The primary objectives of this workshop are to help customers prepare and write their own RFP document and to acquaint them with currently available system offerings from leading suppliers. This workshop has been synchronized with the UC and Cloud workshops so that a similar set of requirements is being used for all three sessions.

Key take-aways for this workshop are:
• A comprehensive RFP system performance document covering basic and advanced hardware/software capabilities for current IP telephony and Unified Communications systems. The RFP will also include:
o Use of SIP
o Integration of mobile devices
o Basic Contact Center
• Actual proposals from leading system suppliers with detailed performance specifications and associated summary pricing tables.
• Critiques of response submissions by one of the industry’s leading enterprise communications system analysts and end user consultants.
•Scoring of vendor responses based on TCO and ability to meet the RFP requirements

Businesses of all sizes are looking for a distinct choice of voice service providers. They’re demanding cost effective, productivity-enhancing alternatives that will scale to support their growth and free them to focus on their business. With their own networks managed from first to last mile, the cable companies represent a clear alternative to the traditional legacy-laden telcos. To further meet the needs of its present and future customers, Comcast Business Class will announce a major addition to its portfolio of voice services. Stop by and hear the new news.

Collaboration technologies are changing the way individuals communicate. With the advent of smart phones being brought to the workforce, organizations have new ways for empowering people to stay connected anywhere. How can you manage the desires of your employees to choose their devices, while maintaining your security policies? Join us for a case study of an organization that is leveraging open communication solutions supported on any PBX, and observing tremendous reductions in costs, with brilliantly simple applications that are easy to use, deploy and manage.

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

The market for IP Telephony systems and services continues to face challenges from the rough economy, but there’s a silver lining for buyers who can enjoy lower prices, increased system performance, and no/low interest financing as buying incentives.

Cisco continues to run strong in this market, which is also continuing to adjust to the absence of Nortel and competition abounds for that customer base. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Lync is making inroads, challenging traditional notions of architecture – and market leadership. And the trends towards Cloud-based communications, social networking and mobile communications each create new options for how enterprises communicate internally and externally.

This session will include updated telephony system market forecasts and supplier share estimates; a discussion of which enterprise communications system features and applications are hot and which are not; a review of major market trends, such as Cloud Computing and hosted solutions and virtualization; and a critical analysis of the leading system suppliers and their flagship offerings.

Key Questions:
• Which vendors are hot and which are not in the enterprise communications market?
• Are Cloud-based solutions taking business away from hardware equipment and software vendors?
• How are the traditional system suppliers adjusting to changing market conditions and who may not be around when the smoke clears?
• Are customers actually buying and implementing Unified Communications offerings or is it still all hype?
• Will tablets make desktop telephone instruments obsolete?

The explosion in wireless and the desire for the latest and greatest smartphone or tablet has made “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device – all the rage. But BYOD is just the latest example of how the “Consumerization” of IT is changing user behavior as well as corporate policies about what can attach to and be sent over the network.

In this Summit, we’ll discuss the steps you can realistically take to influence user choices in mobile device usage, application deployment and the use of social networking. Can you issue outright bans on specific gear and apps and, if you try, how do you enforce such policies? We’ll also discuss the best strategies for living with user-driven technology adoption; and we’ll even try to find ways that you can leverage such adoption to the business’s benefit, and encourage responsible trialing and use of emerging technologies by the user base. You’ll come away with the elements of a strategy for setting and enforcing policies, and accommodating user choice wherever possible.

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

From on-premise VC to hosted/cloud-based video - what's out there and what infrastructure is needed to implement video conferencing in your network? In this session, we'll take a holistic approach to dissecting the current trends in VC – cloud, mobility, integration and virtualization – and discuss the differences and benefits of each, from technical requirements to TCO.

Video solutions have been extended from the telepresence suite to the conference room, enterprise desktop and, now, to mobile tablets and smartphones. Will this trend finally make video calling ubiquitous? Will the impact be technical or social, or will there be no real impact? A short presentation will layout the issues and be followed by a panel discussing the impact of mobility on video.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the vendor's perspective?
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the customer's perspective?
* What should a customer look for when considering a mobile video solution?
* Which of the current solutions is ready for prime time in the enterprise?

The RFP process for a selecting a new enterprise communica¬tions system has changed significantly during the past few years based on changing technologies, pricing models, system design and performance capabilities. New ‘Cloud-based’ offerings as well as those from Unified Communications vendors have dramatically changed the landscape.

The primary objectives of this workshop are to help customers prepare and write their own RFP document and to acquaint them with currently available system offerings from leading suppliers. This workshop has been synchronized with the UC and Cloud workshops so that a similar set of requirements is being used for all three sessions.

Key take-aways for this workshop are:
• A comprehensive RFP system performance document covering basic and advanced hardware/software capabilities for current IP telephony and Unified Communications systems. The RFP will also include:
o Use of SIP
o Integration of mobile devices
o Basic Contact Center
• Actual proposals from leading system suppliers with detailed performance specifications and associated summary pricing tables.
• Critiques of response submissions by one of the industry’s leading enterprise communications system analysts and end user consultants.
•Scoring of vendor responses based on TCO and ability to meet the RFP requirements

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

Enterprises are bombarded with requests from employees to open business applications to personally-owned devices. The business and economic benefits are enormous but so are the technical and business challenges in ensuring the integrity, security and continuity of your business. This session will address the scope of variables to be considered and introduce the range of options available to care for these needs. It is imperative that businesses proactively plan for ‘BYOD’ and rationalize its role in the overall mobility strategy.

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

Telepresence will soon be in every living room, using that big HD screen and Internet connection that we already own. The simplicity of use and the quality delivered by these systems will soon have enterprise execs wondering why they can’t take that early morning call from Europe in their living room. And the CFO will be asking why the systems in the office cost 8X the systems at home.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What is the expected quality and feature set of home solutions?
* Will home solutions be expected to connect of conference rooms?
* How will home solutions change consumer behavior and expectations?
* How will home solutions change the conferencing manager's or IT manager's job?
* One year later, what happened to Cisco umi and what can we learn from it?

All the key trends in communications and collaboration, from Unified Communications to the use of Social Networking tools , come together in modern contact centers. While traditional calling still dominates, most contact centers now operate with email and chat, some are beginning to incorporate video.
So, with all the new tools, systems and services available, what’s the state of contact center market? Which tools are actually being deployed and which are still in hype phase? And which vendors and solutions are winning and which are fading?
This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the dynamics in today’s contact center market and with the data you need to proceed to enhance, enlarge or migrate your contact center to the next plateau.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based?
• Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership?
• How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types?
• The trend toward contact center consolidation continues, but are more companies establishing contact centers? Is the overall market growing, shrinking or staying constant? And what does that mean in terms of the development of new products and services for the market?

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

Come learn about the OpenTouch™ converged multimedia communications architecture that helps turn enterprise communications into meaningful conversations and business services. OpenTouch solutions deliver native multimedia (video, voice, IM,…) and multi-device (desk phones, smart phones, mobile, laptops…) conversation services to help users better engage with customers, partners and peers improving productivity at work. For more information, please visit: http://enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com/.

What communications applications are really feasible for an enterprise to move into the cloud today? There’s only one sure-fire way to know: Find enterprise decision-makers who have actually made the move and can talk about how they did it. In this session, enterprise end users who are using hosted applications will discuss how they reached their decision, the procurement process they used, the implementation they went through, and how things are going now. You’ll walk out with real-life stories from the trenches that will help guide your decision-making as you approach the issues that the industry colleagues on stage have already grappled with.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What factors caused the panelists’ enterprises to pursue a hosted solution for the application?
* How did they choose their providers? Did they have a formal RFP?
* What SLAs and technology-refresh provisions do they have with their hosted provider?
* What implementation issues arose? How were these overcome?
* Where do the panelists go from here? Are they looking at moving more applications to the cloud? What’s the long-term plan?

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

Desktop phones are not going away, but they are evolving. New features and functions are being added—everything from high-end video screens to touch-screen keypads. And in the area of basic functionality, vendors continue to strive to deliver enterprise telephony in affordable, cost-efficient form factors. At the same time, the battle continues to rage between proprietary protocols and SIP—which is, itself, implemented in proprietary ways by most vendors. The bottom line, though, is that the vendors say their desk phone sales hit all-time highs last year, so someone must still be buying. If you’re one of these, and you expect phones to be a part of your procurements for at least the near term future, you should attend

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the hottest new features for desktop phones—and is anyone really buying these phones for these features, or are they all sizzle?
* Has the cost of a basic desktop phone fallen significantly since the IP/SIP transition hit critical mass? If so, how much; and if not, why not?
* Should you go with your vendor’s line of phones, or should you investigate third-party SIP phones? Can all SIP phones talk to all SIP-based IP-PBXs? Do you have to make sure a SIP phone is certified to work with your vendor’s SIP PBX?
* What is the realistic expectation for enterprises’ continued investment in desktop telephones?
* If you have to buy desk phones today, how do you think about investment protection?

Desktop phones are not going away, but they are evolving. New features and functions are being added—everything from high-end video screens to touch-screen keypads. And in the area of basic functionality, vendors continue to strive to deliver enterprise telephony in affordable, cost-efficient form factors. At the same time, the battle continues to rage between proprietary protocols and SIP—which is, itself, implemented in proprietary ways by most vendors. The bottom line, though, is that the vendors say their desk phone sales hit all-time highs last year, so someone must still be buying. If you’re one of these, and you expect phones to be a part of your procurements for at least the near term future, you should attend

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the hottest new features for desktop phones—and is anyone really buying these phones for these features, or are they all sizzle?
* Has the cost of a basic desktop phone fallen significantly since the IP/SIP transition hit critical mass? If so, how much; and if not, why not?
* Should you go with your vendor’s line of phones, or should you investigate third-party SIP phones? Can all SIP phones talk to all SIP-based IP-PBXs? Do you have to make sure a SIP phone is certified to work with your vendor’s SIP PBX?
* What is the realistic expectation for enterprises’ continued investment in desktop telephones?
* If you have to buy desk phones today, how do you think about investment protection?

Business are now asking for integration of desktop video solutions with group and telepresence systems. They are also asking for integration of video with the PBX and the UC core to enable video telephony and click-to-videoconference. In such systems, there are three possible call control centers: the enterprise PBX, the UC server, and the call control native to group video systems. This session discusses tradeoffs and strategies for integrating group video systems with telephony and with common UC environments.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How can we integrate and scale Lync video with group/telepresence viceo?
* What options exist for integrating group/telepresence with my existing Sametime deployment?
* Is it possible to have a fully integrated UC environment that includes voice, video, and unified call control?
* What tradeoffs do I have to make if I want Lync integrated with my PBX and with my group/telepresence video solutions?

This workshop starts with the simple question: If an enterprise wanted to eliminate all or most of its premises-based communications equipment and deploy a fully loaded unified communications solutions from a hosted and managed cloud services provider, could it do so today? If so, what would such an implementation look like? Who could deliver it? And what would it cost? And most importantly, how would these costs compare with an equivalent premises-based offering or an overlay UC option?

As with the other two RFP sessions at Enterprise Connect, the Cloud RFP describes a 2,000 person domestically headquartered company with two branch locations and a number of mobile workers. This session present solutions from leading hosted UC providers covering each of the major unified communications applications (presence, IM, call control, audio/video/web conferencing, unified messaging, etc.), and to ascertain whether an organization, using these major players, could craft a cost-effective, secure, robust cloud-based communications platform for its users today.
The results will be contrasted and compared in terms of the total cost of ownership with that of premises-based and the overlay providers responding to RFP. There will be a thorough review of the solutions proposed by those responding to the RFP, and the analysis will include:
• Architecture
• Cost
• Feature/functionality/quality of service
• Migration path
• Manageability
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Level of risk (security, compliance, control/accountability)
• TCO as compared to premises-based offerings
You will leave the session with wealth of information about cloud-based UC services offerings and with the knowledge necessary to determine whether a hosted UC solution could be right for your organization.

The panel will feature representatives from Thinking Phone Networks, Verizon, M5 Networks, Cypress Communications, BT, InterCall/West, Interactive Intelligence, Siemens, and Avaya.

Mobility is becoming a key driver in enterprise communications architecture and services. Mobile technologies can spur individual user productivity and accessibility and they have the potential to spawn total business transformation as we have seen in industries like industries – from package delivery and health care.

At the same time mobility-related expenses have been the fastest-growing line item in enterprise telecom budgets, and wireless costs will continue to rise as smartphones and tablets replace more traditional desktop phones and PCs. Further, there’s growing pressure on IT departments to support a wider range of mobile devices or to allow users to “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device, but IT still needs to be able to secure, manage and support them.

In this session we’ll hear from leading mobility and UC suppliers, see what developments they are watching, and explore what’s next for the mobile enterprise.

KEY QUESTIONS
• UC suppliers are interested in mobility, but are mobility equipment and service providers interested in UC?
• Why hasn’t there been more market acceptance of Wi-Fi voice, dual mode FMC, mobile UC clients, and the other mobility options that have been tried thus far? Has anything changed?
• The mobility industry is focused on the consumer market, so what will it take to get them to deliver products and services that offer the same type of compelling user experience we have seen in the consumer market, but that respond to enterprise requirements for security, high availability and integration with the wired UC offerings?
• Will the service providers’ push for “walled gardens” choke the promise wireless has for both enterprises and consumers?
• What are prospects for the new Microsoft-Skype team in the enterprise? How about Google?

A consensus is emerging that most enterprises will implement some form of “hybrid cloud” that deploys communications functions in a mix of environments: public cloud (i.e., hosted); private cloud (i.e., the enterprise datacenter); and on-premises. The task will be to determine which communications capabilities should reside in which types of environments. This session will feature a discussion and debate among representatives of the various viewpoints and constituencies, who will offer their perspectives on why you should choose a particular mix of cloud and CPE deployments. You’ll leave the session with an idea of what’s possible now, and what direction you should take your planning for the next 12-18 months.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the risk/reward tradeoffs of deploying different communications functions in different parts of a “hybrid” deployment?
* Are all communications capabilities available for all types of environments (public cloud, private cloud and on-prem)? Do different types of providers specialize in different capabilities, and how does this factor influence your decision-making?
* What interoperability or integration challenges are you likely to encounter when you try to implement a hybrid cloud environment?
* What cost factors are involved in the decision-making? Considerations may include capex vs. opex; vendor incentive programs; product lifecycles and end-of-life; and how your own strategic technology plans fit with what’s available now and what’s on the horizon.
* Where do the risks of vendor lock-in reside in hybrid cloud implementations, and how do you avoid them?

A consensus is emerging that most enterprises will implement some form of “hybrid cloud” that deploys communications functions in a mix of environments: public cloud (i.e., hosted); private cloud (i.e., the enterprise datacenter); and on-premises. The task will be to determine which communications capabilities should reside in which types of environments. This session will feature a discussion and debate among representatives of the various viewpoints and constituencies, who will offer their perspectives on why you should choose a particular mix of cloud and CPE deployments. You’ll leave the session with an idea of what’s possible now, and what direction you should take your planning for the next 12-18 months.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the risk/reward tradeoffs of deploying different communications functions in different parts of a “hybrid” deployment?
* Are all communications capabilities available for all types of environments (public cloud, private cloud and on-prem)? Do different types of providers specialize in different capabilities, and how does this factor influence your decision-making?
* What interoperability or integration challenges are you likely to encounter when you try to implement a hybrid cloud environment?
* What cost factors are involved in the decision-making? Considerations may include capex vs. opex; vendor incentive programs; product lifecycles and end-of-life; and how your own strategic technology plans fit with what’s available now and what’s on the horizon.
* Where do the risks of vendor lock-in reside in hybrid cloud implementations, and how do you avoid them?

SIP Trunking has attracted more interest than any network service in recent memory, and the reason is simple: The potential for immediate – and often substantial – cost savings. But even as SIP Trunking has been rolling out across the county, another network-based offering – The Cloud – has generated enthusiasm and hype unmatched since the dot.com boom.

Beyond SIP Trunking’s potential for cost savings is another critically important attribute: SIP Trunking positions the network to handle true end-to-end IP communications – it handles IP traffic regardless of media type: voice, video or data. It is also likely to be the preferred service for accessing Cloud-based services.

The combination of SIP Trunking and the Cloud gives service providers an altogether new set of business models: SIP Trunking, while cannibalizing traditional T1 services, ultimately lowers their network costs, while the Cloud represents heretofore unavailable revenue streams. Together, they could be foundational elements in a new public network.

Join this important session where thought- and market-leaders in network services talk about the opportunities – and challenges – SIP Trunking and the Cloud offer both service providers and their enterprise customers.

KEY QUESTIONS
• If end-to-end IP becomes ubiquitous, what will change in the service providers’ opex budgets, and what changes for enterprise architectures and capabilities?
• What are the prospects for SIP Trunking interoperability? How soon, if ever, will we see it?
• Is the Cloud making inroads into enterprise communications procurements and deployments?
• What are SIP Trunking’s “gotchas”? How about the Cloud’s?
• Is there more to SIP Trunking than a cost-reduction play?

The explosion in wireless and the desire for the latest and greatest smartphone or tablet has made “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device – all the rage. But BYOD is just the latest example of how the “Consumerization” of IT is changing user behavior as well as corporate policies about what can attach to and be sent over the network.

In this Summit, we’ll discuss the steps you can realistically take to influence user choices in mobile device usage, application deployment and the use of social networking. Can you issue outright bans on specific gear and apps and, if you try, how do you enforce such policies? We’ll also discuss the best strategies for living with user-driven technology adoption; and we’ll even try to find ways that you can leverage such adoption to the business’s benefit, and encourage responsible trialing and use of emerging technologies by the user base. You’ll come away with the elements of a strategy for setting and enforcing policies, and accommodating user choice wherever possible.

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

Microsoft’s Lync has been available for more than a year, and it promises a whole new approach to architecting and delivering enterprise communications and collaborations services and apps. Microsoft also promised to lower the cost of communications as well.

So, what’s the experience so far? To find out we’ve asked consultants who’ve selected and installed Lync systems as well as enterprise execs who’ve been living with Lync to tell us how the experience has been so far.

Key Questions
• What were the driving factors for selecting Lync over other approaches and competing solutions?
• What have been the biggest surprises and “gotchas” during the process?
• How has Lync impacted the cost architecture for communications and collaboration within the affected enterprises?
• How have the end users responded? Training requirements?
• What elements of the overall communications and collaboration architecture have been most affected by Lync?

Can the once proud-to-be-an-outlier go mainstream? Skype came into enterprises via the back door – subscribers simply loaded clients onto their PCs and soon they were no longer using Skype to call family and friends, but also colleagues and business associates. Then video via Skype came on the scene and soon business conference calls were running over the once-free service, with consequences for traffic planning and bandwidth requirements.

Now, Skype’s part of Microsoft and could ride deep and wide inroads into enterprise IT. But for that to happen, what does Skype need to do? And, perhaps more importantly, what does enterprise IT need to do?
KEY QUESTIONS
• Skype made earned its reputation as being a free service, but if that’s the case, why was it worth $8 billion to Microsoft? How much will it cost an enterprise to use Skype and what will it get for its money?
• What levels of service guarantees does Skype provide?
• Is Skype a viable competitor to AT&T, Verizon and other traditional service providers, or is it specialized for niche applications?
• What are the implications for network design and management when Skype is introduced into the enterprise?
• What are likely scenarios for Skype’s network evolution and service capabilities?

Changing work patterns are driving businesses of all sizes to do more with small teams, often collaborating across time zones and international borders. However, there is a gap between room videoconferencing systems, which are generally too large for small meeting rooms or individual offices, and desktop webcams, which don’t work well for more than one person. In this session Eric of Logitech for Business will discuss “The New Office” and how changing work environments are pushing innovation in the emerging small-team collaboration space. As an added bonus, several lucky attendees will leave the room with exciting new products from Logitech.

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

For decades, we’ve heard that “convergence” was coming. Well, it’s arrived, and it’s becoming pervasive. The old boundaries within communications and collaboration are breaking down, as business apps and processes run across wired and wireless facilities, and are composed of a mix of data, voice, video and graphics.

As technology boundaries blur, so do others, most notably, what will you buy and from whom: Whether the topic is communications or the data center, video or storage, servers or collaboration services, there are new options for partners and delivery systems. Services and apps can be provided via the Cloud, on-premises or a mix of the two. As a result, it can no longer be assumed that the communications and collaboration partners an enterprise has had for the past decade will remain so in the decade to come.

So what is the going-forward model for enterprise communications and collaboration? Will the traditional pillars of enterprise communications architecture -- voice vs. data vs. video -- be replaced with choices organized around the desktop vs. the network vs. the “Cloud”? If the “consumerization of IT” is inevitable, how will the vendors meet the enduring requirements for security, compliance scalability, manageability and cost-effectiveness? And as consolidation continues within the industry, is genuine competition going to disappear?

A panel of senior IT executives will discuss these and related issues. The conversation will be essential as you develop your architecture and review your options for systems, services and applications.

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

What’s the true state of communications security in 2012? Where are the most serious threats, and what is – and what isn’t -- being done to stop them? In this session, you’ll hear from leading experts, who will offer their real-world findings drawn from documented and observed operational attacks against U.S. enterprises and their contact centers, to give you a sense of what sorts of attacks pose the greatest risk to your communications, and which are still, at this stage, more distant prospects. You’ll come away with an understanding of what threats to fixed and mobile communications should concern you most, and how to tackle them working in conjunction with your enterprise’s security team and the vendor community.

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

Unified Communications works perfectly within the enterprise, but even more value can be gained from inter-company UC – a feature known as ‘inter-domain federation’. Having full multi-modal, presence-driven communications access to key business partners could be an extremely powerful tool.

Unfortunately, the federation feature is not ubiquitously supported among UC vendors within their own implementation and inter-vendor UC federation is not available at all. This session addresses the benefits of federation as well as the challenges that federation presents as a next-generation communications mechanism.

Key Questions
• What is the current status of federation, and how is being used?
• What value does UC federation deliver, and how much of that value can be achieved today?
• What are the risks that come with deploying federation, and how they be mitigated?
• When will openly interoperable inter-vendor federation become a reality?
• Will communications service providers play a role in facilitating federation networks, or will it continue to be conducted direct from company to company over the Internet?

With click-to-call and Skype, not to mention softphones, computers have been used for voice communications for quite some time. But all the approaches deployed to date have been proprietary, and none come built into the most ubiquitous computer-based tool: the browser. But that’s about to change, as the standards-bodies and browser providers, notably Google and Mozilla, push to make the browser a key element in the communications experience.

This session will examine the technical approaches and provide an update on the standard-bodies’ deliberations. This is a critically important issue, that has the potential to alter the UC landscape and change our expectations for web-based communications.

Key Questions
• Is the technology for voice-enabled web browsers ready for prime time within the enterprise?
• What is likely to emerge from the standards groups? Will browser providers wait until standards are complete?
• What capabilities will voice-enabled browsers deliver?
• If an enterprise migrates toward voice-enabled browsers, what changes in the communications cost structure?
• Can voice-enabled browsers deliver the level of security and manageability enterprise require?

Mobility is becoming a key driver in enterprise communications architecture and services. Mobile technologies can spur individual user productivity and accessibility and they have the potential to spawn total business transformation as we have seen in industries like industries – from package delivery and health care.

At the same time mobility-related expenses have been the fastest-growing line item in enterprise telecom budgets, and wireless costs will continue to rise as smartphones and tablets replace more traditional desktop phones and PCs. Further, there’s growing pressure on IT departments to support a wider range of mobile devices or to allow users to “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device, but IT still needs to be able to secure, manage and support them.

In this session we’ll hear from leading mobility and UC suppliers, see what developments they are watching, and explore what’s next for the mobile enterprise.

KEY QUESTIONS
• UC suppliers are interested in mobility, but are mobility equipment and service providers interested in UC?
• Why hasn’t there been more market acceptance of Wi-Fi voice, dual mode FMC, mobile UC clients, and the other mobility options that have been tried thus far? Has anything changed?
• The mobility industry is focused on the consumer market, so what will it take to get them to deliver products and services that offer the same type of compelling user experience we have seen in the consumer market, but that respond to enterprise requirements for security, high availability and integration with the wired UC offerings?
• Will the service providers’ push for “walled gardens” choke the promise wireless has for both enterprises and consumers?
• What are prospects for the new Microsoft-Skype team in the enterprise? How about Google?

For decades, we’ve heard that “convergence” was coming. Well, it’s arrived, and it’s becoming pervasive. The old boundaries within communications and collaboration are breaking down, as business apps and processes run across wired and wireless facilities, and are composed of a mix of data, voice, video and graphics.

As technology boundaries blur, so do others, most notably, what will you buy and from whom: Whether the topic is communications or the data center, video or storage, servers or collaboration services, there are new options for partners and delivery systems. Services and apps can be provided via the Cloud, on-premises or a mix of the two. As a result, it can no longer be assumed that the communications and collaboration partners an enterprise has had for the past decade will remain so in the decade to come.

So what is the going-forward model for enterprise communications and collaboration? Will the traditional pillars of enterprise communications architecture -- voice vs. data vs. video -- be replaced with choices organized around the desktop vs. the network vs. the “Cloud”? If the “consumerization of IT” is inevitable, how will the vendors meet the enduring requirements for security, compliance scalability, manageability and cost-effectiveness? And as consolidation continues within the industry, is genuine competition going to disappear?

A panel of senior IT executives will discuss these and related issues. The conversation will be essential as you develop your architecture and review your options for systems, services and applications.

SIP Trunking has attracted more interest than any network service in recent memory, and the reason is simple: The potential for immediate – and often substantial – cost savings. But even as SIP Trunking has been rolling out across the county, another network-based offering – The Cloud – has generated enthusiasm and hype unmatched since the dot.com boom.

Beyond SIP Trunking’s potential for cost savings is another critically important attribute: SIP Trunking positions the network to handle true end-to-end IP communications – it handles IP traffic regardless of media type: voice, video or data. It is also likely to be the preferred service for accessing Cloud-based services.

The combination of SIP Trunking and the Cloud gives service providers an altogether new set of business models: SIP Trunking, while cannibalizing traditional T1 services, ultimately lowers their network costs, while the Cloud represents heretofore unavailable revenue streams. Together, they could be foundational elements in a new public network.

Join this important session where thought- and market-leaders in network services talk about the opportunities – and challenges – SIP Trunking and the Cloud offer both service providers and their enterprise customers.

KEY QUESTIONS
• If end-to-end IP becomes ubiquitous, what will change in the service providers’ opex budgets, and what changes for enterprise architectures and capabilities?
• What are the prospects for SIP Trunking interoperability? How soon, if ever, will we see it?
• Is the Cloud making inroads into enterprise communications procurements and deployments?
• What are SIP Trunking’s “gotchas”? How about the Cloud’s?
• Is there more to SIP Trunking than a cost-reduction play?

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

Suppose you want to get out of the business of running your core PBX/UC platform—or you at least want to supplement this CPE function with cloud-based services for some locations. Who should you turn to? Are the big carriers who used to be your Centrex providers the right choice for hosted UC? How much does size matter when it comes to hosted UC? How important is the technology platform that the provider uses? This session will give you a clear idea of who the players are, what their competencies are, and where they play, both geographically and in terms of the functionality they can provide you.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Who are the key players in basic hosted call control, and who leads in implementation of hosted UC applications like presence/IM? Are these the same players, and if not, do you need multiple hosted providers?
* How are managed/hosted UC offerings typically priced/ How do you make sure you’re getting a good deal?
* What UC features can hosted providers support? What other important capabilities, like mobile integration, can they support?
* What are the most important factors in choosing a hosted provider?
* What are the prospects for the provider landscape in the next 12-18 months?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

In the next couple years nearly half of the workforce will be Millennials, bringing with them a new set of expectations in terms of how they communicate. The evolution of Unified Communications solutions has resulted in a myriad of delivery models for UC user tools, but will they easily adapt to the Net Generation? This session explores fundamentally different thinking on how architectures should be delivering UC services that create more powerful and more adaptable ways for the end users to access the power of Unified Communications.

The enterprise collaboration landscape is changing. Driven by the need to connect disparate workers, partners and even customers, enterprises are quickly adopting tools such as unified communications, video conferencing, workgroup collaboration services, and social computing. But absent a clear architecture and roadmap, we find that most deployments are disjointed and wind up in silos, leaving organizations unable to take advantage of seamless anytime, anywhere collaboration.

During this workshop, we’ll define the components of a UC&C architecture. We’ll identify key trends driving the need for an enterprise collaboration strategy, we’ll look at examples of how vendors and their partners are integrating their UC&C offerings, and finally we’ll share a roadmap for implementation based on numerous engagements with end user companies.

Virtualization is coming to enterprise communications, in two areas: The server and the desktop. At the server/datacenter, most enterprise communications platform vendors claim to have at least some ability to virtualize their call control and/or related applications. And in a more recent development, vendors have been tackling the more challenging task of making client softphones work with virtualized desktop infrastructures (VDIs). This session will help you understand two issues: Are the vendors’ claims valid—in other words, are their virtualized systems really ready for prime time? And if so, how should your enterprise respond? You’ll come away with a road map for virtualizing your enterprise communications.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* How far have the vendors progressed in offering virtualized versions of their server software, and specifically what applications can they provide in a virtualized environment?
* Can you deploy voice endpoints in a VDI environment?
* What are the benefits of moving sooner rather than later toward virtualization for your communications? What are the risks?
* What steps will you have to take organizationally in order to make virtualization work for your communications? Will the IT staff that have overseen communications up to now have to give up some control of these functions as they move into the datacenter with the other virtualized enterprise applications?
* Can video be deployed in a virtualized environment? If this is isn’t possible now, is such a capability on the horizon?

The explosion in wireless and the desire for the latest and greatest smartphone or tablet has made “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device – all the rage. But BYOD is just the latest example of how the “Consumerization” of IT is changing user behavior as well as corporate policies about what can attach to and be sent over the network.

In this Summit, we’ll discuss the steps you can realistically take to influence user choices in mobile device usage, application deployment and the use of social networking. Can you issue outright bans on specific gear and apps and, if you try, how do you enforce such policies? We’ll also discuss the best strategies for living with user-driven technology adoption; and we’ll even try to find ways that you can leverage such adoption to the business’s benefit, and encourage responsible trialing and use of emerging technologies by the user base. You’ll come away with the elements of a strategy for setting and enforcing policies, and accommodating user choice wherever possible.

What communications applications are really feasible for an enterprise to move into the cloud today? There’s only one sure-fire way to know: Find enterprise decision-makers who have actually made the move and can talk about how they did it. In this session, enterprise end users who are using hosted applications will discuss how they reached their decision, the procurement process they used, the implementation they went through, and how things are going now. You’ll walk out with real-life stories from the trenches that will help guide your decision-making as you approach the issues that the industry colleagues on stage have already grappled with.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What factors caused the panelists’ enterprises to pursue a hosted solution for the application?
* How did they choose their providers? Did they have a formal RFP?
* What SLAs and technology-refresh provisions do they have with their hosted provider?
* What implementation issues arose? How were these overcome?
* Where do the panelists go from here? Are they looking at moving more applications to the cloud? What’s the long-term plan?

Desktop phones are not going away, but they are evolving. New features and functions are being added—everything from high-end video screens to touch-screen keypads. And in the area of basic functionality, vendors continue to strive to deliver enterprise telephony in affordable, cost-efficient form factors. At the same time, the battle continues to rage between proprietary protocols and SIP—which is, itself, implemented in proprietary ways by most vendors. The bottom line, though, is that the vendors say their desk phone sales hit all-time highs last year, so someone must still be buying. If you’re one of these, and you expect phones to be a part of your procurements for at least the near term future, you should attend

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the hottest new features for desktop phones—and is anyone really buying these phones for these features, or are they all sizzle?
* Has the cost of a basic desktop phone fallen significantly since the IP/SIP transition hit critical mass? If so, how much; and if not, why not?
* Should you go with your vendor’s line of phones, or should you investigate third-party SIP phones? Can all SIP phones talk to all SIP-based IP-PBXs? Do you have to make sure a SIP phone is certified to work with your vendor’s SIP PBX?
* What is the realistic expectation for enterprises’ continued investment in desktop telephones?
* If you have to buy desk phones today, how do you think about investment protection?

Five years ago video conferencing standards were clear, and the top 5 vendors worked hard at maintaining interoperability. The vendor landscape has now changed dramatically -- enterprises want UC- video integration, consumer-oriented desktops, TV-based services are being introduced and Skype carries more video conferencing minutes than anyone, using a proprietary protocol. We now have many more options, and they don’t interoperate. How does an enterprise make an intelligent decision about video conferencing in today’s market?

KEY QUESTIONS
* Which vendors are supporting which video protocols and standards today?
* How and when will consumer video solutions interoperate with the Enterprise?
* What is the status of inter-company video conferencing?
* Many vendors offer gateways to other protocols, why isn’t this sufficient?

For decades, we’ve heard that “convergence” was coming. Well, it’s arrived, and it’s becoming pervasive. The old boundaries within communications and collaboration are breaking down, as business apps and processes run across wired and wireless facilities, and are composed of a mix of data, voice, video and graphics.

As technology boundaries blur, so do others, most notably, what will you buy and from whom: Whether the topic is communications or the data center, video or storage, servers or collaboration services, there are new options for partners and delivery systems. Services and apps can be provided via the Cloud, on-premises or a mix of the two. As a result, it can no longer be assumed that the communications and collaboration partners an enterprise has had for the past decade will remain so in the decade to come.

So what is the going-forward model for enterprise communications and collaboration? Will the traditional pillars of enterprise communications architecture -- voice vs. data vs. video -- be replaced with choices organized around the desktop vs. the network vs. the “Cloud”? If the “consumerization of IT” is inevitable, how will the vendors meet the enduring requirements for security, compliance scalability, manageability and cost-effectiveness? And as consolidation continues within the industry, is genuine competition going to disappear?

A panel of senior IT executives will discuss these and related issues. The conversation will be essential as you develop your architecture and review your options for systems, services and applications.

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

Your enterprise probably has users, customers and partners on Skype, and many may use GoogleVoice as well. If your enterprise IP communications platform could talk to these public services, you could greatly expand your reach, using voice, video or other collaboration modes, without ever touching the legacy PSTN. Skype and Google both have the global scale and branding to position themselves at the center of a new public network—but the matter is complicated by Skype’s acquisition by Microsoft, and Google’s potential to compete with the vendors in this space. This session will help you understand the mechanisms available today to use cloud-based providers like Skype and Google to reach your stakeholders with all-IP communications; it will also show you the obstacles to this goal. You’ll come away with a grasp of the state of the art today, and what you can expect tomorrow.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Can Skype or Google Voice be integrated at an enterprise level to create a “cloud” for carrying internal voice/video traffic?
* What’s the likely impact of the Microsoft acquisition of Skype? What are Google’s plans for Google Voice?
* What other ways may you be able to integrate your internal UC system with other systems? Are there any realistic prospects for federation among the UC vendors that would allow you to connect systems directly?
* What are the prospects for social networking platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn to evolve into a new public network for UC and collaboration?

SIP Trunking has attracted more interest than any network service in recent memory, and the reason is simple: The potential for immediate – and often substantial – cost savings. But even as SIP Trunking has been rolling out across the county, another network-based offering – The Cloud – has generated enthusiasm and hype unmatched since the dot.com boom.

Beyond SIP Trunking’s potential for cost savings is another critically important attribute: SIP Trunking positions the network to handle true end-to-end IP communications – it handles IP traffic regardless of media type: voice, video or data. It is also likely to be the preferred service for accessing Cloud-based services.

The combination of SIP Trunking and the Cloud gives service providers an altogether new set of business models: SIP Trunking, while cannibalizing traditional T1 services, ultimately lowers their network costs, while the Cloud represents heretofore unavailable revenue streams. Together, they could be foundational elements in a new public network.

Join this important session where thought- and market-leaders in network services talk about the opportunities – and challenges – SIP Trunking and the Cloud offer both service providers and their enterprise customers.

KEY QUESTIONS
• If end-to-end IP becomes ubiquitous, what will change in the service providers’ opex budgets, and what changes for enterprise architectures and capabilities?
• What are the prospects for SIP Trunking interoperability? How soon, if ever, will we see it?
• Is the Cloud making inroads into enterprise communications procurements and deployments?
• What are SIP Trunking’s “gotchas”? How about the Cloud’s?
• Is there more to SIP Trunking than a cost-reduction play?

The vast majority of enterprises are still in pilots or early-stage deployments of SIP Trunks, but a few early adopters have migrated most or all of their wide area VOIP to SIP trunks. In this session, you’ll get a chance to hear from a panel of these end users. They’ll discuss their experiences, what worked, what didn’t, what they’d do differently, and what they plan to do when their next contract for SIP Trunks comes due. You’ll get real-world knowledge that you can put to use when you implement SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* What’s the biggest challenge when implementing SIP Trunks?

* Why did these panelists move so quickly to implement SIP Trunks?

* What have been the major benefits?

* What would they have done differently the first time around, and what do they plan to do differently as they move forward?

Suppose you want to get out of the business of running your core PBX/UC platform—or you at least want to supplement this CPE function with cloud-based services for some locations. Who should you turn to? Are the big carriers who used to be your Centrex providers the right choice for hosted UC? How much does size matter when it comes to hosted UC? How important is the technology platform that the provider uses? This session will give you a clear idea of who the players are, what their competencies are, and where they play, both geographically and in terms of the functionality they can provide you.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Who are the key players in basic hosted call control, and who leads in implementation of hosted UC applications like presence/IM? Are these the same players, and if not, do you need multiple hosted providers?
* How are managed/hosted UC offerings typically priced/ How do you make sure you’re getting a good deal?
* What UC features can hosted providers support? What other important capabilities, like mobile integration, can they support?
* What are the most important factors in choosing a hosted provider?
* What are the prospects for the provider landscape in the next 12-18 months?

Desktop phones are not going away, but they are evolving. New features and functions are being added—everything from high-end video screens to touch-screen keypads. And in the area of basic functionality, vendors continue to strive to deliver enterprise telephony in affordable, cost-efficient form factors. At the same time, the battle continues to rage between proprietary protocols and SIP—which is, itself, implemented in proprietary ways by most vendors. The bottom line, though, is that the vendors say their desk phone sales hit all-time highs last year, so someone must still be buying. If you’re one of these, and you expect phones to be a part of your procurements for at least the near term future, you should attend

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the hottest new features for desktop phones—and is anyone really buying these phones for these features, or are they all sizzle?
* Has the cost of a basic desktop phone fallen significantly since the IP/SIP transition hit critical mass? If so, how much; and if not, why not?
* Should you go with your vendor’s line of phones, or should you investigate third-party SIP phones? Can all SIP phones talk to all SIP-based IP-PBXs? Do you have to make sure a SIP phone is certified to work with your vendor’s SIP PBX?
* What is the realistic expectation for enterprises’ continued investment in desktop telephones?
* If you have to buy desk phones today, how do you think about investment protection?

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

Contact centers have long used outsourcers to handle seasonal increases in demand, but these have typically been turnkey operations that provided agents, management and technology. More recently, vendors that specialize in contact center software have begun promoting the idea of cloud-sourcing just the technology portion, either in addition to or instead of the turnkey approach. Is the cloud the right place for your next ACD/contact center platform to reside? In this session, you’ll hear from industry experts who will help you understand the pros and cons of cloud-based contact centers, and you’ll come away knowing who the thought leaders and market movers are in this space.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* Why would you move your contact center application to the cloud?

* Are enterprises typically using cloud-based contact center software to supplement, or to replace, their existing on-prem implementations?

* Does moving the contact center to the cloud help an enterprise implement home-based agents, and how does this affect the larger staffing issues?

* How does cloud-sourcing the contact center affect handling of multimedia channels?

* How does cloud-sourcing affect the contact center’s use of social media?

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook represent an important emerging channel for enterprises to communicate with their customers, partners, and other stakeholders. And in many cases, these stakeholders will be talking about your enterprise in these forums whether you know it or not. So how does the enterprise harness the power of social networks, and also monitor them? In this session, leading experts will help you understand what tools are available for monitoring social networks and, more importantly, for bringing their input into the customer contact infrastructure you already have in place—and how you can act on what you learn through this channel. You’ll leave with specific best practices, products, and prospects for bringing the social media world into the contact center.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Is social media-contact center integration simply a matter of monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions of your enterprise? How do you turn these mentions into actionable intelligence?
* Should social media be a formal channel for interacting with contact center agents, or is it simply a source of data and ad hoc information?
* What analytics capabilities exist for your enterprise to quantify and act on the information you receive through social media channels?
* Is it really a good idea to encourage customers to contact your enterprise through social media? What are the potential pitfalls?
* Are any enterprises actually doing social media-contact center integration today, or is this more of a future prospect?

Contact centers have long used outsourcers to handle seasonal increases in demand, but these have typically been turnkey operations that provided agents, management and technology. More recently, vendors that specialize in contact center software have begun promoting the idea of cloud-sourcing just the technology portion, either in addition to or instead of the turnkey approach. Is the cloud the right place for your next ACD/contact center platform to reside? In this session, you’ll hear from industry experts who will help you understand the pros and cons of cloud-based contact centers, and you’ll come away knowing who the thought leaders and market movers are in this space.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* Why would you move your contact center application to the cloud?

* Are enterprises typically using cloud-based contact center software to supplement, or to replace, their existing on-prem implementations?

* Does moving the contact center to the cloud help an enterprise implement home-based agents, and how does this affect the larger staffing issues?

* How does cloud-sourcing the contact center affect handling of multimedia channels?

* How does cloud-sourcing affect the contact center’s use of social media?

All the key trends in communications and collaboration, from Unified Communications to the use of Social Networking tools , come together in modern contact centers. While traditional calling still dominates, most contact centers now operate with email and chat, some are beginning to incorporate video.
So, with all the new tools, systems and services available, what’s the state of contact center market? Which tools are actually being deployed and which are still in hype phase? And which vendors and solutions are winning and which are fading?
This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the dynamics in today’s contact center market and with the data you need to proceed to enhance, enlarge or migrate your contact center to the next plateau.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based?
• Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership?
• How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types?
• The trend toward contact center consolidation continues, but are more companies establishing contact centers? Is the overall market growing, shrinking or staying constant? And what does that mean in terms of the development of new products and services for the market?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

Virtualization is coming to enterprise communications, in two areas: The server and the desktop. At the server/datacenter, most enterprise communications platform vendors claim to have at least some ability to virtualize their call control and/or related applications. And in a more recent development, vendors have been tackling the more challenging task of making client softphones work with virtualized desktop infrastructures (VDIs). This session will help you understand two issues: Are the vendors’ claims valid—in other words, are their virtualized systems really ready for prime time? And if so, how should your enterprise respond? You’ll come away with a road map for virtualizing your enterprise communications.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* How far have the vendors progressed in offering virtualized versions of their server software, and specifically what applications can they provide in a virtualized environment?
* Can you deploy voice endpoints in a VDI environment?
* What are the benefits of moving sooner rather than later toward virtualization for your communications? What are the risks?
* What steps will you have to take organizationally in order to make virtualization work for your communications? Will the IT staff that have overseen communications up to now have to give up some control of these functions as they move into the datacenter with the other virtualized enterprise applications?
* Can video be deployed in a virtualized environment? If this is isn’t possible now, is such a capability on the horizon?

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

The vast majority of enterprises are still in pilots or early-stage deployments of SIP Trunks, but a few early adopters have migrated most or all of their wide area VOIP to SIP trunks. In this session, you’ll get a chance to hear from a panel of these end users. They’ll discuss their experiences, what worked, what didn’t, what they’d do differently, and what they plan to do when their next contract for SIP Trunks comes due. You’ll get real-world knowledge that you can put to use when you implement SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* What’s the biggest challenge when implementing SIP Trunks?

* Why did these panelists move so quickly to implement SIP Trunks?

* What have been the major benefits?

* What would they have done differently the first time around, and what do they plan to do differently as they move forward?

Your enterprise probably has users, customers and partners on Skype, and many may use GoogleVoice as well. If your enterprise IP communications platform could talk to these public services, you could greatly expand your reach, using voice, video or other collaboration modes, without ever touching the legacy PSTN. Skype and Google both have the global scale and branding to position themselves at the center of a new public network—but the matter is complicated by Skype’s acquisition by Microsoft, and Google’s potential to compete with the vendors in this space. This session will help you understand the mechanisms available today to use cloud-based providers like Skype and Google to reach your stakeholders with all-IP communications; it will also show you the obstacles to this goal. You’ll come away with a grasp of the state of the art today, and what you can expect tomorrow.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Can Skype or Google Voice be integrated at an enterprise level to create a “cloud” for carrying internal voice/video traffic?
* What’s the likely impact of the Microsoft acquisition of Skype? What are Google’s plans for Google Voice?
* What other ways may you be able to integrate your internal UC system with other systems? Are there any realistic prospects for federation among the UC vendors that would allow you to connect systems directly?
* What are the prospects for social networking platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn to evolve into a new public network for UC and collaboration?

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

Interoperability, cloud, context-aware mobility, business process optimization, and the consumerization of IT are the five driving forces that will shape the future of UC. AVST will discuss these 5 Megatrends and a practical approach to evaluating your UC strategy.

• Interoperability is Key to Successful UC Deployment
• UC and the Cloud: What is Working Today
• Context-Aware Mobility is Enabling a Wave of Location-Aware Applications
• How to Deploy Business Process Efficiency
• With the Consumerization of IT, Securely Support Employee Owned Devices

AVST is the only Unified Communications vendor that delivers best-of-breed solutions on the industry's most interoperable platform.

Business are now asking for integration of desktop video solutions with group and telepresence systems. They are also asking for integration of video with the PBX and the UC core to enable video telephony and click-to-videoconference. In such systems, there are three possible call control centers: the enterprise PBX, the UC server, and the call control native to group video systems. This session discusses tradeoffs and strategies for integrating group video systems with telephony and with common UC environments.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How can we integrate and scale Lync video with group/telepresence viceo?
* What options exist for integrating group/telepresence with my existing Sametime deployment?
* Is it possible to have a fully integrated UC environment that includes voice, video, and unified call control?
* What tradeoffs do I have to make if I want Lync integrated with my PBX and with my group/telepresence video solutions?

If videoconferencing were simple, we wouldn't need these sessions. Several customers will describe what their motives were for deploying these solutions, what hosted, managed, or CPE strategies they followed, and what the challenges and rewards have been.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What strategy options are available to the end user in deploying telepresence and videoconferencing?
* What challenges have been overcome?
* What are the benefits?
* What would the customer do differently if doing it all over again?

Unified Communications works perfectly within the enterprise, but even more value can be gained from inter-company UC – a feature known as ‘inter-domain federation’. Having full multi-modal, presence-driven communications access to key business partners could be an extremely powerful tool.

Unfortunately, the federation feature is not ubiquitously supported among UC vendors within their own implementation and inter-vendor UC federation is not available at all. This session addresses the benefits of federation as well as the challenges that federation presents as a next-generation communications mechanism.

Key Questions
• What is the current status of federation, and how is being used?
• What value does UC federation deliver, and how much of that value can be achieved today?
• What are the risks that come with deploying federation, and how they be mitigated?
• When will openly interoperable inter-vendor federation become a reality?
• Will communications service providers play a role in facilitating federation networks, or will it continue to be conducted direct from company to company over the Internet?

Five years ago video conferencing standards were clear, and the top 5 vendors worked hard at maintaining interoperability. The vendor landscape has now changed dramatically -- enterprises want UC- video integration, consumer-oriented desktops, TV-based services are being introduced and Skype carries more video conferencing minutes than anyone, using a proprietary protocol. We now have many more options, and they don’t interoperate. How does an enterprise make an intelligent decision about video conferencing in today’s market?

KEY QUESTIONS
* Which vendors are supporting which video protocols and standards today?
* How and when will consumer video solutions interoperate with the Enterprise?
* What is the status of inter-company video conferencing?
* Many vendors offer gateways to other protocols, why isn’t this sufficient?

Unified Communications continues to gain market momentum because it focuses a wide range of communications and collaboration capabilities on solving business problems – from improving the productivity of individuals and workgroups to revising and revitalizing business processes. But the sheer scope of UC also poses problems: Where to begin? How to organize the technology choices? How to best match UC capabilities with the needs and culture of the enterprise.

This session will help you organize your thinking and planning for UC. It is organized around three fundamental implementation options that encompass UC offerings that are already in the market as well as those that are on the way. The session provides detailed information, with schematics based on currently deliverable products from market leaders for each option. The implementation options are:
* Expand Voice Systems: You want to add applications to your voice communications system, such as presence, mobility support, in-house conferencing (audio, web and/or video conferencing), and
desktop communications (possibly including instant messaging or other tools). Optionally, you may
choose to integrate the selected elements with your installed desktop applications.

* Expand Desktop Systems: You want to add communications to your desktop application systems
(such as e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, or collaborative workspaces) such as presence, click-to-communicate, conferencing (audio, web and/or video), and mobility. Optionally, you may choose to integrate the selected elements with your installed PBX systems.

* Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP): You want to integrate communications with core business applications in your enterprise, such as with applications for sales, service, logistics, human resources, or specialized vertical market apps such as in health care, financial services, manufacturing, transportation, education, or government. This focus is on presenting communication tools in context of the applications and within the business application user interfaces (on PCs, laptops, mobile devices, appliances, or telephones).

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

Customer experience scores can accurately predict future revenue – the higher the score, the higher the impact on revenue. It is for this reason, every organization should uncover ways that they can improve those scores. In this session, we’ll show you how blending two leading software-based communications solutions together, Microsoft Lync and the Customer Interaction Center™ from Interactive Intelligence, can dramatically improve the customer experience. This isn’t just a discussion around the contact center, but throughout your organization.

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

The SIP Forum has completed an interoperability specification, SIPConnect 1.1, which is intended to ensure interoperability between enterprise CPE and carrier networks. But the carriers never officially committed to SIPConnect 1.1, so it’s likely that interoperability will continue to be an issue when you investigate and procure SIP Trunking services. This session will give you the details about the status of SIP Trunking Interoperability today, and prospects for the future. You’ll understand what you need to do to make sure that interoperability challenges don’t hold up your migration to SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What interoperability issues have historically plagued SIP Trunking, and how close are these to being resolved?
* What is SIPConnect 1.1, and what are its prospects for emerging as a meaningful specification that’s adhered to by all parties involved in SIP Trunking?
* What specific interoperability issues aren’t solved by SIPConnect 1.1, and what is being done about these?
* Are some carriers more committed to interoperability than others? Are some vendors’ SBCs or gateways more likely to interoperate with more carriers?

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

Why is unified communications and social software like a Reese’s peanut butter cup? They bring together two things that are great on their own and make them even better when they’re combined. Enterprises have been improving productivity and efficiency from using unified communications tools for the past few years, and more recently from enterprise-grade social software solutions developed for business collaboration. While these are both great business tools by themselves, their value dramatically increases when they’re integrated as part of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) solutions and used to solve business problems. The lines are blurring between the social aspects and the project-centric collaboration tools. Tying in UC’s presence, IM, and click to communicate capabilities with a company’s social software community makes it easier to connect with people and share information.

The use cases for UC and social software are endless, and we’re just at the beginning of seeing the power of these tools combined. Listen to early adopters who have been at the forefront of this new phase of UCC, and hear how they’ve integrated their various tools together to create business value and enhance the bottom line.

Behind the basic questions --How big is the Unified Communications market, and which vendors are winning/losing?—lurks a more difficult question: What "counts" as Unified Communications when we're measuring this market? In this session, a leading UC analyst will present research that looks at the market's size, players and prospects, the impact of UC on end users and future trends.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• Who are the principal players, and how are they positioning themselves?

• How is Unified Communications defined, and who—according to this definition—is really selling in this market? Who’s buying?

• What are the drivers behind the growth from a customer perspective?

• What are the current and likely future patterns of adoption— e.g., by job type, mobile work, business process?

• How is the current economic climate affecting adoption? When will this market take off?

Suppose you want to get out of the business of running your core PBX/UC platform—or you at least want to supplement this CPE function with cloud-based services for some locations. Who should you turn to? Are the big carriers who used to be your Centrex providers the right choice for hosted UC? How much does size matter when it comes to hosted UC? How important is the technology platform that the provider uses? This session will give you a clear idea of who the players are, what their competencies are, and where they play, both geographically and in terms of the functionality they can provide you.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Who are the key players in basic hosted call control, and who leads in implementation of hosted UC applications like presence/IM? Are these the same players, and if not, do you need multiple hosted providers?
* How are managed/hosted UC offerings typically priced/ How do you make sure you’re getting a good deal?
* What UC features can hosted providers support? What other important capabilities, like mobile integration, can they support?
* What are the most important factors in choosing a hosted provider?
* What are the prospects for the provider landscape in the next 12-18 months?

Apple began shipping iPads in April 2010 and already these devices have become the most important new mobile computing platform in a generation. Sensing the potential, Avaya and Cisco have introduced their own tablet products, and virtually every other IP-PBX and UC supplier is developing tablet clients and figuring where tablets will fit in their overall product strategy.
In the meantime, the tablet market has split between 7-inch and 10-inch models, Android is starting to challenge Apple’s iOS with options like Amazon’s $200 Kindle Fire, HP has folded up the tent on WebOS, and Microsoft is waiting in the wings.
Smartphone-based mobile UC has met with limited user acceptance, so will UC on tablets be more of the same? Have the vendors figured out what users will need in a UC-capable tablet, or are they simply chasing the latest trend? Most importantly, with dozens of tablets appearing on the market, all of which use the same operating same operating systems, is there any additional value to be had from a branded table that we won’t get from a much cheaper general-purpose tablet device?
Find out what the we’ve learned about the tablet experience in the past year, what applications they are being used to serve, and what enterprise buyers should be looking for going forward.
Key Questions:
• With the wide range of tablets all of which are supporting the Android operating system, what additional value are we getting from a “branded” tablet from an IP-PBX or UC supplier?
• What requirements distinguish the enterprise tablet from the consumer tablet?
• What applications do you expect will drive tablet acceptance? Will “voice” be on that list?
• With 7-inch and 10-inch tablet options available, who’s buying what, and are there different applications or use cases that drive the buyer one way or the other?
• Is your next desk phone going to be a tablet?
• If the users do prefer commonality between the smartphone and the laptop, what happens to vendors who don’t have both options covered?

The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services.

So, is the last PBX you bought, the last PBX you’ll ever buy? And if so, what will replace it? This session will examine the myths and realities of the new platform options, as well as the vendors and technology trends – virtualization, mobility, software architectures and unified communications – that are driving the change.

If videoconferencing were simple, we wouldn't need these sessions. Several customers will describe what their motives were for deploying these solutions, what hosted, managed, or CPE strategies they followed, and what the challenges and rewards have been.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What strategy options are available to the end user in deploying telepresence and videoconferencing?
* What challenges have been overcome?
* What are the benefits?
* What would the customer do differently if doing it all over again?

Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams.

This RFP will show the technologies, configurations and pricing for the necessary UC products, installation and maintenance. UC functions will include: desktop and mobile clients with presence, Instant Messaging and click-to-communicate; Mobility; Conferencing; Collaboration; and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Results will be compared for all vendors who respond to the RFP and vendors will participate in panel discussions of the results.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• What are the requirements and costs to install UC with our existing PBX?
• How does UC integrate to our existing PBX? What functions, if any, will be compromised?
• Will we be better off technically and financially by installing UC with our current PBX than by making UC part of a new IP PBX procurement?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the leading vendors for UC with our current PBX?

SIP trunking is the hottest technology trend in enterprise communications , but how do you procure the services and equipment to make it a success for your organization? This Deep Dive session will offer detailed presentations on the services and technologies you will need to acquire in order to roll out SIP trunking.

You’ll hear details of carriers’ offerings—pricing, service availability, service level agreements, and much more. You’ll get tips for how to negotiate SIP Trunking agreements with your service providers. And you’ll receive in-depth information about the equipment that goes into a SIP trunking implementation—IP-PBXs, VOIP gateways, Session Border Controllers, etc.

You will come away from this session with a clear understanding of the service and CPE elements that make up a SIP trunking implementation, and be more prepared to start developing RFIs and RFPs for SIP trunking for your enterprise.

The SIP Forum has completed an interoperability specification, SIPConnect 1.1, which is intended to ensure interoperability between enterprise CPE and carrier networks. But the carriers never officially committed to SIPConnect 1.1, so it’s likely that interoperability will continue to be an issue when you investigate and procure SIP Trunking services. This session will give you the details about the status of SIP Trunking Interoperability today, and prospects for the future. You’ll understand what you need to do to make sure that interoperability challenges don’t hold up your migration to SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What interoperability issues have historically plagued SIP Trunking, and how close are these to being resolved?
* What is SIPConnect 1.1, and what are its prospects for emerging as a meaningful specification that’s adhered to by all parties involved in SIP Trunking?
* What specific interoperability issues aren’t solved by SIPConnect 1.1, and what is being done about these?
* Are some carriers more committed to interoperability than others? Are some vendors’ SBCs or gateways more likely to interoperate with more carriers?

As Unified Communications technologies mature and integrate more tightly with the rest of the enterprise infrastructure, the tools for managing UC also mature, and offer increased opportunities to automate processes that used to be done manually by telecom/IT staff. Automating the provisioning and management systems has obvious benefits in terms of cost savings and increased ease of use for the end user. So where do we stand with the move towards greater automation in provisioning and management? In this session, you’ll hear real-world users describe their automated management processes and how they were able to achieve savings and greater user satisfaction. You’ll come away with specific steps you can take to emulate their success.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What management and provisioning processes can you automate for UC today? What’s in the future?
* What must be the state of your underlying UC deployment and your infrastructure generally in order to support automated UC management?
* What configuration processes can be converted to self-service for the end user? Which ones shouldn’t be?
* What interoperability and integration issues exist when you’re trying to automate the management of your UC systems?

The vast majority of enterprises are still in pilots or early-stage deployments of SIP Trunks, but a few early adopters have migrated most or all of their wide area VOIP to SIP trunks. In this session, you’ll get a chance to hear from a panel of these end users. They’ll discuss their experiences, what worked, what didn’t, what they’d do differently, and what they plan to do when their next contract for SIP Trunks comes due. You’ll get real-world knowledge that you can put to use when you implement SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* What’s the biggest challenge when implementing SIP Trunks?

* Why did these panelists move so quickly to implement SIP Trunks?

* What have been the major benefits?

* What would they have done differently the first time around, and what do they plan to do differently as they move forward?

Telepresence will soon be in every living room, using that big HD screen and Internet connection that we already own. The simplicity of use and the quality delivered by these systems will soon have enterprise execs wondering why they can’t take that early morning call from Europe in their living room. And the CFO will be asking why the systems in the office cost 8X the systems at home.

KEY QUESTIONS
* What is the expected quality and feature set of home solutions?
* Will home solutions be expected to connect of conference rooms?
* How will home solutions change consumer behavior and expectations?
* How will home solutions change the conferencing manager's or IT manager's job?
* One year later, what happened to Cisco umi and what can we learn from it?

This session will here from several vendors who are working on new technologies, services, or solutions that may alter the fundamental way we use video and collaboration applications in the future.

KEY QUESTIONS

* What's coming down the pike that I need to know about?

* How will some of these new technologies or applications change the way I work?

* How will these new ideas save money?

* Will these new ideas disrupt the present market and vendors?

Suppose you want to get out of the business of running your core PBX/UC platform—or you at least want to supplement this CPE function with cloud-based services for some locations. Who should you turn to? Are the big carriers who used to be your Centrex providers the right choice for hosted UC? How much does size matter when it comes to hosted UC? How important is the technology platform that the provider uses? This session will give you a clear idea of who the players are, what their competencies are, and where they play, both geographically and in terms of the functionality they can provide you.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Who are the key players in basic hosted call control, and who leads in implementation of hosted UC applications like presence/IM? Are these the same players, and if not, do you need multiple hosted providers?
* How are managed/hosted UC offerings typically priced/ How do you make sure you’re getting a good deal?
* What UC features can hosted providers support? What other important capabilities, like mobile integration, can they support?
* What are the most important factors in choosing a hosted provider?
* What are the prospects for the provider landscape in the next 12-18 months?

Unified Communications works perfectly within the enterprise, but even more value can be gained from inter-company UC – a feature known as ‘inter-domain federation’. Having full multi-modal, presence-driven communications access to key business partners could be an extremely powerful tool.

Unfortunately, the federation feature is not ubiquitously supported among UC vendors within their own implementation and inter-vendor UC federation is not available at all. This session addresses the benefits of federation as well as the challenges that federation presents as a next-generation communications mechanism.

Key Questions
• What is the current status of federation, and how is being used?
• What value does UC federation deliver, and how much of that value can be achieved today?
• What are the risks that come with deploying federation, and how they be mitigated?
• When will openly interoperable inter-vendor federation become a reality?
• Will communications service providers play a role in facilitating federation networks, or will it continue to be conducted direct from company to company over the Internet?

For decades, we’ve heard that “convergence” was coming. Well, it’s arrived, and it’s becoming pervasive. The old boundaries within communications and collaboration are breaking down, as business apps and processes run across wired and wireless facilities, and are composed of a mix of data, voice, video and graphics.

As technology boundaries blur, so do others, most notably, what will you buy and from whom: Whether the topic is communications or the data center, video or storage, servers or collaboration services, there are new options for partners and delivery systems. Services and apps can be provided via the Cloud, on-premises or a mix of the two. As a result, it can no longer be assumed that the communications and collaboration partners an enterprise has had for the past decade will remain so in the decade to come.

So what is the going-forward model for enterprise communications and collaboration? Will the traditional pillars of enterprise communications architecture -- voice vs. data vs. video -- be replaced with choices organized around the desktop vs. the network vs. the “Cloud”? If the “consumerization of IT” is inevitable, how will the vendors meet the enduring requirements for security, compliance scalability, manageability and cost-effectiveness? And as consolidation continues within the industry, is genuine competition going to disappear?

A panel of senior IT executives will discuss these and related issues. The conversation will be essential as you develop your architecture and review your options for systems, services and applications.

Five years ago video conferencing standards were clear, and the top 5 vendors worked hard at maintaining interoperability. The vendor landscape has now changed dramatically -- enterprises want UC- video integration, consumer-oriented desktops, TV-based services are being introduced and Skype carries more video conferencing minutes than anyone, using a proprietary protocol. We now have many more options, and they don’t interoperate. How does an enterprise make an intelligent decision about video conferencing in today’s market?

KEY QUESTIONS
* Which vendors are supporting which video protocols and standards today?
* How and when will consumer video solutions interoperate with the Enterprise?
* What is the status of inter-company video conferencing?
* Many vendors offer gateways to other protocols, why isn’t this sufficient?

Everyone expects video traffic to continue to grow within the enterprise, but for those running the communications network, this trend is potentially dangerous: Especially in the case of ad hoc video usage like Skype and YouTube, end user video usage is not being centrally rolled out, managed, and controlled. But even when video is a part of a controlled rollout—say, of a Unified Communications portal like Microsoft Lync—you may not have a clear sense of how much video will actually be used. So do you overprovision the network, possibly devoting more resources than are needed? Or do you risk a situation where video traffic swamps the network and hinders the performance of mission-critical applications? In this session, we’ll offer suggestions to help you walk the fine line of provisioning for video in a world where video’s future is still in flux.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are all the potential sources of video traffic in your network, and how do you get visibility on what traffic generators are a real factor in your enterprise?
* Who should you be in regular contact with across the enterprise, so that you won’t be surprised by sudden spikes in video usage?
* How might mobile video affect traffic load on your network—both from devices using your WLAN, and from traffic originating in the cellular network but traversing onto your corporate LAN/WAN?
* If you do find your network hit by unpredictable spikes of video traffic, what do you do to remediate?

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

Real-time traffic (voice and video) demands a network that delivers low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. And that’s not easy to accomplish. The dynamic character of modern networks, and the growing requirement for highly distributed configurations can lead to errors in design or implementation that cause quality problems for voice and video apps.

And so, a new breed of testing methodologies and tools is required to test or monitor converged networks and to isolate problems. This session will analyze and categorize these tools, and list vendors that provide the different kinds of solutions needed to manage today’s complex networks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Why are new tools required to support voice and video conferencing? Why can’t I use the tools that have been serving me well for years?
* What features are required in these tools for managing and monitoring real-time networks?
* Who are the vendors and what types of tools to they offer?

Unified Communication projects are complex and require integration into other parts of IT, business processes, and the culture of the organization. This session outlines an architectural framework for UC that integrates into other frameworks such as TOGAF & IMS. A solid UC architecture enables an organization to easily adapt to changes that occur in business requirements, technology, and vendor products.

The majority of UC implementations use a "best of breed" approach which requires a strong architecture in order to make sure all the pieces work well together. Attendees of this session will walk away with a methodology on creating a UC architecture that is vendor independent and that takes advantage of SIP.

KEY QUESTIONS
• UC has many elements, so can a single architecture really encompass everything UC?
• Best of breed isn’t new, but it’s often characterized as too costly in terms of inventory and training requirements. What’s really changed?
• With so much communications and collaboration going mobile, is mobility a core feature of this new architecture or just one of several important elements?
• Is SIP Trunking more than a pure cost play?

SIP Trunking is one the hottest issues in enterprise communications because it promises cost savings and true end-to-end IP voice connections. But the number of enterprises actually using SIP Trunks to their full potential is still a small minority—partly because of the way in which carriers are offering these services, and partly because technical/interoperability challenges remain.

This workshop will examine the architecture options involved with deploying SIP Trunks, review the carrier offerings and ordering procedures, analyze the role of Session Border Controllers and options for configuration and present the critical issues--and best practices--for troubleshooting and managing SIP Trunks.

Contact centers have long used outsourcers to handle seasonal increases in demand, but these have typically been turnkey operations that provided agents, management and technology. More recently, vendors that specialize in contact center software have begun promoting the idea of cloud-sourcing just the technology portion, either in addition to or instead of the turnkey approach. Is the cloud the right place for your next ACD/contact center platform to reside? In this session, you’ll hear from industry experts who will help you understand the pros and cons of cloud-based contact centers, and you’ll come away knowing who the thought leaders and market movers are in this space.

KEY QUESTIONS:

* Why would you move your contact center application to the cloud?

* Are enterprises typically using cloud-based contact center software to supplement, or to replace, their existing on-prem implementations?

* Does moving the contact center to the cloud help an enterprise implement home-based agents, and how does this affect the larger staffing issues?

* How does cloud-sourcing the contact center affect handling of multimedia channels?

* How does cloud-sourcing affect the contact center’s use of social media?

All the key trends in communications and collaboration, from Unified Communications to the use of Social Networking tools , come together in modern contact centers. While traditional calling still dominates, most contact centers now operate with email and chat, some are beginning to incorporate video.
So, with all the new tools, systems and services available, what’s the state of contact center market? Which tools are actually being deployed and which are still in hype phase? And which vendors and solutions are winning and which are fading?
This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the dynamics in today’s contact center market and with the data you need to proceed to enhance, enlarge or migrate your contact center to the next plateau.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based?
• Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership?
• How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types?
• The trend toward contact center consolidation continues, but are more companies establishing contact centers? Is the overall market growing, shrinking or staying constant? And what does that mean in terms of the development of new products and services for the market?

The RFP process for a selecting a new enterprise communica¬tions system has changed significantly during the past few years based on changing technologies, pricing models, system design and performance capabilities. New ‘Cloud-based’ offerings as well as those from Unified Communications vendors have dramatically changed the landscape.

The primary objectives of this workshop are to help customers prepare and write their own RFP document and to acquaint them with currently available system offerings from leading suppliers. This workshop has been synchronized with the UC and Cloud workshops so that a similar set of requirements is being used for all three sessions.

Key take-aways for this workshop are:
• A comprehensive RFP system performance document covering basic and advanced hardware/software capabilities for current IP telephony and Unified Communications systems. The RFP will also include:
o Use of SIP
o Integration of mobile devices
o Basic Contact Center
• Actual proposals from leading system suppliers with detailed performance specifications and associated summary pricing tables.
• Critiques of response submissions by one of the industry’s leading enterprise communications system analysts and end user consultants.
•Scoring of vendor responses based on TCO and ability to meet the RFP requirements

The RFP process for a selecting a new enterprise communica¬tions system has changed significantly during the past few years based on changing technologies, pricing models, system design and performance capabilities. New ‘Cloud-based’ offerings as well as those from Unified Communications vendors have dramatically changed the landscape.

The primary objectives of this workshop are to help customers prepare and write their own RFP document and to acquaint them with currently available system offerings from leading suppliers. This workshop has been synchronized with the UC and Cloud workshops so that a similar set of requirements is being used for all three sessions.

Key take-aways for this workshop are:
• A comprehensive RFP system performance document covering basic and advanced hardware/software capabilities for current IP telephony and Unified Communications systems. The RFP will also include:
o Use of SIP
o Integration of mobile devices
o Basic Contact Center
• Actual proposals from leading system suppliers with detailed performance specifications and associated summary pricing tables.
• Critiques of response submissions by one of the industry’s leading enterprise communications system analysts and end user consultants.
•Scoring of vendor responses based on TCO and ability to meet the RFP requirements

As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area enterprise network.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?

Real-time traffic (voice and video) demands a network that delivers low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. And that’s not easy to accomplish. The dynamic character of modern networks, and the growing requirement for highly distributed configurations can lead to errors in design or implementation that cause quality problems for voice and video apps.

And so, a new breed of testing methodologies and tools is required to test or monitor converged networks and to isolate problems. This session will analyze and categorize these tools, and list vendors that provide the different kinds of solutions needed to manage today’s complex networks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* Why are new tools required to support voice and video conferencing? Why can’t I use the tools that have been serving me well for years?
* What features are required in these tools for managing and monitoring real-time networks?
* Who are the vendors and what types of tools to they offer?

Desktop phones are not going away, but they are evolving. New features and functions are being added—everything from high-end video screens to touch-screen keypads. And in the area of basic functionality, vendors continue to strive to deliver enterprise telephony in affordable, cost-efficient form factors. At the same time, the battle continues to rage between proprietary protocols and SIP—which is, itself, implemented in proprietary ways by most vendors. The bottom line, though, is that the vendors say their desk phone sales hit all-time highs last year, so someone must still be buying. If you’re one of these, and you expect phones to be a part of your procurements for at least the near term future, you should attend

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What are the hottest new features for desktop phones—and is anyone really buying these phones for these features, or are they all sizzle?
* Has the cost of a basic desktop phone fallen significantly since the IP/SIP transition hit critical mass? If so, how much; and if not, why not?
* Should you go with your vendor’s line of phones, or should you investigate third-party SIP phones? Can all SIP phones talk to all SIP-based IP-PBXs? Do you have to make sure a SIP phone is certified to work with your vendor’s SIP PBX?
* What is the realistic expectation for enterprises’ continued investment in desktop telephones?
* If you have to buy desk phones today, how do you think about investment protection?

This workshop starts with the simple question: If an enterprise wanted to eliminate all or most of its premises-based communications equipment and deploy a fully loaded unified communications solutions from a hosted and managed cloud services provider, could it do so today? If so, what would such an implementation look like? Who could deliver it? And what would it cost? And most importantly, how would these costs compare with an equivalent premises-based offering or an overlay UC option?

As with the other two RFP sessions at Enterprise Connect, the Cloud RFP describes a 2,000 person domestically headquartered company with two branch locations and a number of mobile workers. This session present solutions from leading hosted UC providers covering each of the major unified communications applications (presence, IM, call control, audio/video/web conferencing, unified messaging, etc.), and to ascertain whether an organization, using these major players, could craft a cost-effective, secure, robust cloud-based communications platform for its users today.
The results will be contrasted and compared in terms of the total cost of ownership with that of premises-based and the overlay providers responding to RFP. There will be a thorough review of the solutions proposed by those responding to the RFP, and the analysis will include:
• Architecture
• Cost
• Feature/functionality/quality of service
• Migration path
• Manageability
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Level of risk (security, compliance, control/accountability)
• TCO as compared to premises-based offerings
You will leave the session with wealth of information about cloud-based UC services offerings and with the knowledge necessary to determine whether a hosted UC solution could be right for your organization.

The panel will feature representatives from Thinking Phone Networks, Verizon, M5 Networks, Cypress Communications, BT, InterCall/West, Interactive Intelligence, Siemens, and Avaya.

The SIP Forum has completed an interoperability specification, SIPConnect 1.1, which is intended to ensure interoperability between enterprise CPE and carrier networks. But the carriers never officially committed to SIPConnect 1.1, so it’s likely that interoperability will continue to be an issue when you investigate and procure SIP Trunking services. This session will give you the details about the status of SIP Trunking Interoperability today, and prospects for the future. You’ll understand what you need to do to make sure that interoperability challenges don’t hold up your migration to SIP Trunks.

KEY QUESTIONS:
* What interoperability issues have historically plagued SIP Trunking, and how close are these to being resolved?
* What is SIPConnect 1.1, and what are its prospects for emerging as a meaningful specification that’s adhered to by all parties involved in SIP Trunking?
* What specific interoperability issues aren’t solved by SIPConnect 1.1, and what is being done about these?
* Are some carriers more committed to interoperability than others? Are some vendors’ SBCs or gateways more likely to interoperate with more carriers?

The explosion in wireless and the desire for the latest and greatest smartphone or tablet has made “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device – all the rage. But BYOD is just the latest example of how the “Consumerization” of IT is changing user behavior as well as corporate policies about what can attach to and be sent over the network.

In this Summit, we’ll discuss the steps you can realistically take to influence user choices in mobile device usage, application deployment and the use of social networking. Can you issue outright bans on specific gear and apps and, if you try, how do you enforce such policies? We’ll also discuss the best strategies for living with user-driven technology adoption; and we’ll even try to find ways that you can leverage such adoption to the business’s benefit, and encourage responsible trialing and use of emerging technologies by the user base. You’ll come away with the elements of a strategy for setting and enforcing policies, and accommodating user choice wherever possible.

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

Video solutions have been extended from the telepresence suite to the conference room, enterprise desktop and, now, to mobile tablets and smartphones. Will this trend finally make video calling ubiquitous? Will the impact be technical or social, or will there be no real impact? A short presentation will layout the issues and be followed by a panel discussing the impact of mobility on video.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the vendor's perspective?
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the customer's perspective?
* What should a customer look for when considering a mobile video solution?
* Which of the current solutions is ready for prime time in the enterprise?

To wrap up Enterprise Connect, please join leading analysts and program Co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf for a conversation, analysis and debate over the major issues covered during the Conference. The issues covered in the Locknote/Town Hall include analyzing the progress in deploying Unified Communications and an assessment of its benefits and challenges; the viability of the Cloud as a deployment model for communications; the progress toward SIP Trunking and a New Public Network; issues around mobility; vendors’ positioning, strengths and weaknesses; and how emerging social networking functionality is being integrated into communications. Hear what the analysts have to say, and come prepared to share your questions, comments and perceptions.

All the key trends in communications and collaboration, from Unified Communications to the use of Social Networking tools , come together in modern contact centers. While traditional calling still dominates, most contact centers now operate with email and chat, some are beginning to incorporate video.
So, with all the new tools, systems and services available, what’s the state of contact center market? Which tools are actually being deployed and which are still in hype phase? And which vendors and solutions are winning and which are fading?
This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the dynamics in today’s contact center market and with the data you need to proceed to enhance, enlarge or migrate your contact center to the next plateau.
KEY QUESTIONS:
• How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based?
• Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership?
• How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types?
• The trend toward contact center consolidation continues, but are more companies establishing contact centers? Is the overall market growing, shrinking or staying constant? And what does that mean in terms of the development of new products and services for the market?

This session explores critical factors to consider while developing your UC strategy. Some of our key topics of discussion will include UC mobility networks, platform agnostic scenarios and the importance of having a comprehensive device management solution. We will also discuss how infrastructure readiness can support UC video and how to overcome challenges with the integration of desktops, telepresence and mobile platforms, securely. Best Practices on premise and cloud-based collaboration services, plus virtualization trends, will round out the presentation. Last but not least, overall security, touching on SIP and next generation firewalls, will be addressed throughout.

What’s the true state of communications security in 2012? Where are the most serious threats, and what is – and what isn’t -- being done to stop them? In this session, you’ll hear from leading experts, who will offer their real-world findings drawn from documented and observed operational attacks against U.S. enterprises and their contact centers, to give you a sense of what sorts of attacks pose the greatest risk to your communications, and which are still, at this stage, more distant prospects. You’ll come away with an understanding of what threats to fixed and mobile communications should concern you most, and how to tackle them working in conjunction with your enterprise’s security team and the vendor community.

To survive in a volatile economic climate, improving productivity is essential. The enterprises that thrive are using innovating customer engagement methodologies to not only avoid churn, but also attract new customers.

Studies show that combining multimedia interaction into a single queue will lead to dramatic drops in employee attrition. Adding Social Media interaction keeps you close to customers. Both these steps can impact the bottom line, but what’s next? What new solutions will drive productivity and better customer experiences?

In this panel session, we examine practical steps for multimedia interaction, Business Process Automation case studies, and detailed ROI secured from breakthroughs in customer interaction management.

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 explore three aspects of multi-vendor UC interoperability:
* Interoperability Requirements: The top ten areas were interoperation is needed
* Interoperability Design: Using interoperation to create optimal solutions
* Interoperability for Installed Systems: How interoperation can save you time and money

This is a crucial session for every enterprise that is in the strategy, planning or implementation phases of Unified Communications.

Video solutions have been extended from the telepresence suite to the conference room, enterprise desktop and, now, to mobile tablets and smartphones. Will this trend finally make video calling ubiquitous? Will the impact be technical or social, or will there be no real impact? A short presentation will layout the issues and be followed by a panel discussing the impact of mobility on video.

KEY QUESTIONS
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the vendor's perspective?
* How does making videoconferencing available on a tablet or smartphone change anything from the customer's perspective?
* What should a customer look for when considering a mobile video solution?
* Which of the current solutions is ready for prime time in the enterprise?

This session will here from several vendors who are working on new technologies, services, or solutions that may alter the fundamental way we use video and collaboration applications in the future.

KEY QUESTIONS

* What's coming down the pike that I need to know about?

* How will some of these new technologies or applications change the way I work?

* How will these new ideas save money?

* Will these new ideas disrupt the present market and vendors?