I just came back from VoiceCon in Orlando last week. It was clear on the show floor that “mobility,” “mobile convergence” and “FMC” were the new monikers at Voicecon, while “unified communications” is still very much in vogue. All of the major enterprise voice vendors clearly messaged this in their booths, and all had a dedicated showcase of some kind of mobile-enabling voice solution. I couldn’t be happier to see large IP Telephony and Unified Communications companies underscoring our message – you can’t do UC without mobility! The challenge they have is their lack of products and solutions for mobility, and that is where Agito partners together with them to deliver a solution that solves customers’ mobility issues.
The conference sessions were well organized and well attended, including the panel on “Enterprise FMC: Is It Real?” that I participated on. To an audience of more than 150 attendees, moderator Michael Finneran delivered a colorful introduction to the fast developing market space of FMC gaining much attention at the show. He did a thorough job in outlining the potential approaches to enterprise FMC, and gave a crisp summary analysis of strengths/weaknesses and important considerations. Of these approaches, only the “PBX-integration approach” (that was the term he used) has real product available today and in production use by enterprises.
On the panel, I was able to talk in the context of actual customer deployment experiences, which I believe the audience appreciated over other panel members. Representatives from a large cell carrier and a large telecom equipment provider could only discuss future direction and intentions. I think the audience appreciated the real-world context of my responses. As proof, in the Q&A session at the end, all the questions from audience were about real-world implementations.
Kudos, to Fred Knight and the old BCR team for putting on another great show.
Rob
PS
If you are interested in more background on eFMC, we have a webinar rebroadcast you can watch and a nice whitepaper with more background information.