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A short note for navigating this section - scroll below for the most recent posts, and then for more, click on the Blog Archive box, where you can view all of my posts, going back to the beginning in March 2005.
Sorry for the short notice, but I’ll be presenting on webinar tomorrow about the value of white label UCaaS to help channels grow their business. I’ll be joined by speakers from sponsor SkySwitch, and the webinar is being presented by Channel Futures. Here’s the registration page, and hope you can join us.
Last week was my fifth go-round as Chair of the Future of Work Expo in Ft. Lauderdale, and given my travel schedule, this is the first chance I’ve had to get this recap done. As good as the 2022 edition was, this was even better, and am expecting nothing less for 2024. Speakers are already asking about coming back, and am keen to start mapping out the program.
Sorry to say that the sessions were not recorded, so you kinda had to be there to take it all in. A few speakers, though, did shoot smartphone video, and have shared snippets on social, but I don’t have direct access to their clips.. Otherwise, the next best thing will be this post, where I’ll share some of my photos (and shots from others), along with a review article that I wrote, and was just posted today on EM360 (log-in required there, but it just takes a moment).
Finally, kudos and thanks to my long-term partners at TMC, for all their support to make FOW Expo happen. If you don’t know - their flagship event, ITExpo, ran its 40th edition last week as well, so clearly, they must be doing something right. If any of this stokes your interest in speaking or sponsoring for 2024, just drop me a line any time!
Managing the endpoints session, with Poly, Sangoma and CDW (photo: Ashley Battle); Making hybrid work session - moderated by David Jodoin, with Cisco, Jeff Pulver and Vizetto; full room during the ChatGPT session.
Barbara Steel from EY - new study on AI and workforce management; AI in the contact center session, with IntelePeer, Quantanite and Twilio (photo: Nadia Ciaravino); Chris Fine moderating quiet quitting session, with Mission Cloud, Premier Virtual, Focus Global Talent, Instawork.
Glenn Goldberg moderating the managing hybrid workforce session, with Vizetto, United Office and me - as a panelist for a change (photo: Barbel Wetenkamp); Agent experience session, with Upstream Works, Genesys, Five9; David Jodoin moderating the employee engagement session, with CDW, Avaya and Prodoscore.
Agenda for Day 1; group photo with some attendees and speakers (photo: unknown, but thanks Jennifer Hotai!); David Jodoin
Last week, I posted my first Enterprise Connect shout-out - am one of the judges for the Innovation Showcase, so if you’re a rising star in this space, you should check out my post.
Now it’s time to get my Enterprise Connect session on your radar. If you don’t know, this is the 5th year doing my update talk on the state of speech technology applications for enterprises. This time around, we’ve varied the format, now going to a roundtable.
Previously, I’ve done a standalone 45-minute talk, but now it will be a short update talk, followed by a roundtable discussion with three speakers. Joining me will be Dan O’Connell from Dialpad, Mahesh Ram from Zoom, and Edward Miller from LumenVox. By design, it’s a varied mix of voices, and I hope you’ll join us - Wednesday, March 29 at 4pm. I’ll update this post when I find out which room we’re in, but all the other details are here.
Also, below, feel free to use my special code to get $400 off your registration fee!
I’ve got a new podcast to share, this time with NICE. Am back for another episode of CX Pulse, hosted by Amelia Earhart, and this time we’re talking about the bigger picture for how AI is - and can be - deployed in the contact center.
There’s no direct link to specific episodes, so you have to scroll through their web page, but since mine is recent, it’s near the top - “AI in the Contact Center”. Also, there is a direct link for Apple Podcast subscribers, or here on Spotify, so those are other ways to access it.
Calling all innovators! This is the first of two updates for Enterprise Connect 2023, and it’s shaping up to be pretty big. Another post is coming about my panel session, but this one is for the Innovation Showcase, which has been hosted by colleague Dave Michels for a few years.
I’ve been invited to be a judge for the submissions, so I have a small role to play here, albeit behind the scenes. The theme for 2023 is “Collaboration Reimagined”, so if that’s you, your application needs to be in by March 1. To learn more, here’s the link, and if you apply, I’ll be quietly assessing your entry along with the other judges. :-)
Otherwise, as the banner below shows, I’ll be speaking - and moderating - and details are coming on that in my next post. And… if you haven’t registered yet, feel free to use the code showing there to save $400.
Got a new white paper to share - this one is for NICE, and is a bit of a sequel to an earlier white paper I did for them. I touched on it briefly during a webinar last week, and to get the full story, here’s the registration link for downloading.
January ended up being more about video and podcasting than writing, so I only have one public article to share. I did, however, write four other articles last month, two of which are ghost-written, and two will run sometime this month.
Weighing the Pros and Cons of Asynchronous Collaboration, TechTarget, Jan. 4
Got another webinar to share here. This one is with NICE, and it draws on a recent white paper I did for them. As the title in the visual below shows, we’ll be exploring the bigger picture for AI in the contact center, and why it’s much more than chatbots.
I’ll be joined by Lauren Maschio from their Product Marketing Team, and the early response has been really great, so it should be well-attended. It’s happening next Thursday, January 26 at 11 ET, and here’s the link to register.
That’s the next webinar on my schedule - running next Thursday, Jan. 12 at 11am ET. I’m one of three analysts talking about the big trends we see happening this year around collaboration, along with IR’s CEO, John Ruthven. That would be fellow BCStrategies colleagues, Blair Pleasant and Kevin Kieller.
I hope you can join us, and the registration details are here.
With 2022 coming to a close, I just have one public writing piece for December, and it starts an exploration of a new topic for me - more to come in future writeups.
Telemarketing Fraud Presents an Unacceptable Risk to Businesses, No Jitter, Dec. 20
This week was my turn to contribute an article to No Jitter from the BC Strategies team, and it’s a big topic - telemarketing fraud. As consumers, we all know what that looks like, but since we’d rather not think about it, the rest of the story tends to live in dark corners where there’s a constant struggle to stamp out or mitigate the damage done by bad actors.
There are a lot of moving parts here, and many have a direct impact on the telecom ecosystem. I’ve been researching this space recently, and the challenges are more daunting than you might think. This is my first analysis of telemarketing fraud, and there’s lot more to explore, and I hope you give this a read here on No Jitter.
Last week, I was a guest analyst on UK-based Big CX News, hosted by Charlie Mitchell. He had a full panel of thought leaders, and it was fun sharing all of our perspectives on some recent big news items. Hope to do it again soon, and hope you check it out - here’s the link.
Longer-form writing takes, well, longer to do, longer to be reviewed, and longer to be published. I do a lot of writing for all lengths, and here’s a current example of what I call an Insight Report. This would be longer than an article, shorter than a white paper, but substantive enough to be gated content.
I’ve been working with Upstream Works Software for a few years now, and when the stars line up, we do a couple of these annually. The latest one has been posted to their website, and here’s the registration page to get it.
The title is pretty self-explanatory, and speaks to a key trend driving just about everything in the contact center space these days: The AI Opportunity - Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations. I hope you like it, and if any questions, just drop me a line.
Another busy month with travel to events, but three public things I’d been working on were published last month, so here they are if you haven’t seen them yet.
AI for the Contact Center - It’s So Much More than Chatbots, NICE, Nov. 30
Vendors Use AI to Boost Customer Experience in the Contact Center, No Jitter, Nov. 15
The AI Opportunity: Enhance the Agent and Customer Experience with AI Application Integrations, Upstream Works, Nov. 4
With the sub-title being “It’s so much more than chatbots”, you should get the gist pretty quickly. AI has become a must-have for contact centers, and while chatbots are often the entry point for getting on this path, the use cases are much richer.
My analysis examines the drivers for embracing AI, but also for taking a practical approach that gets beyond the hype. The white paper has been featured now on NICE’s website, and here’s the registration page to download a copy.
UK-based EM360 enlists me to host podcasts with their sponsors from time to time, and for this episode, I was in conversation with Mark Sher from Intermedia. There’s a lot of ground to cover with cloud migration, and in the case of UCaaS - as well as CCaaS - the challenge is educating the end buyer about the rationale.
This is very much a you-can’t-get-there-from-here story, and for anyone still on the fence about cloud for business communications, you’ll want to check our podcast out. I’ve long had a nice rapport with Mark, and I hope you’ll enjoy the discussion. Here’s the link, and if you like what’s on tap, I’m sure Mark and his team would love to tell you more.
On Thursday, Dec. 1, Five9 is running the 2022 edition of their CX Summit Canada, and I’ve been brought back again to provide an overview of the contact center market. I’m part of a larger program running through the day - all of it virtual - and later, I’ll be joining an in-person reception in downtown Toronto. The Five9 folks will determine who can attend, and to find out more, here’s the registration link.
New things come up for me pretty regularly, and this time around, I was a guest on CX Pulse, which NICE’s regular podcast. Hosted by Amelia Earhart, we covered some ground around the need to take a digital approach to improving the agent experience. With so much focus on customer experience, it’s easy to overlook the needs of agents, and how important that is for providing great customer experience.
This is my first time being on Amelia’s podcast, and I hope you like it - here’s link to give it a listen.
Trust the Future - that’s Mavenir’s current tag line, and I really like it. This isn’t just any future they’re talking about - it’s mainly about 5G, but also Open RAN. 5G has yet to live up to the hype, especially in North America, but both carriers and wireless vendors seem all-in, including Mavenir.
While most see the future of wireless networks being 5G, Open RAN is an open question. Mavenir looks to be out in front with cloud-native Open RAN, and while the rationale is clear to them - and now to me - their competitors seem to like things the way they are, and mobile operators don’t seem ready for it - yet. Mavenir believes it’s just a matter of time, and if they’re right, they could own this space.
The mobile infrastructure space isn’t a core focus for me, but it’s adjacent to a lot of what I follow, and when thinking of VoIP, and possibly UCaaS and CCaaS, I’ve seen this movie before. Mavenir is a pretty healthy company, and a bit of an anomaly compared to the giants who dominate this market - namely Ericsson and Nokia.
This actually puts them in a great position to push the envelope and be disruptive, and that’s exactly the persona they’re projecting. Sure rings familiar to me, at least with the early days of VoIP, when the first wave of startups brought disruption, and posed a real threat to a well-entrenched status quo - that for the most part have come around to VoIP.
Given Mavenir’s global customer base, they have found plenty of mobile operators willing to adopt more open, more flexible and less costly infrastructure. Without naming names, they have 19 Open RAN deployments across 17 countries, and 4 trials going with Tier 1 carriers, one of which gave a full presentation as to what they’re doing with Open RAN.
Carriers have taken on a lot of debt to finance their 5G buildouts, and to counter that, they need innovation and new services to monetize these networks. Mavenir isn’t in the business of building applications, but with Open RAN - along with the rest of their extensive wireless network portfolio - they provide carriers with a nextgen platform to support programmability so they can develop their own apps instead of relying on third parties.
Just as important, BSS is another key piece of their cloud-based portfolio, as legacy BSS cannot really support these new services, and without a proper billing platform, carriers won’t be able to monetize these new 5G networks. Speaking of 5G, Mavenir did a great job outlining all kinds of use cases, and they have a pretty good handle on what carriers are missing to be successful with 5G.
I tend to view things through the lens of communications and collaboration technologies, and there wasn’t much talk about UCaaS or CCaaS. Instead, the use cases were framed around Industry 4.0 and Enterprise 2.0. These terms may sound generic, but Mavenir provided pretty good use cases and monetization scenarios for each. I’d need a separate post to illustrate all this, but in short, these use cases are in line with my Future of Work research, and I think they’re on the right track here, for sure.
That’s my high-level take for now, and to close out, here are some of my photos.
CEO/Pres. Pardeep Kohli, EVP Stefan Canteralli, Q&A session
Test equipment, anechoic chamber (very cool), OpenBeam radio demo
Event was held at the HALL Arts Hotel, in the center of Dallas’s arts district - my kinda place - high end for sure, but very artsy vibe, and after the sessions - when in Texas, you gotta look the part (hat tip, Carlos Aragon, no pun intended!)…
I’m part of the UC Expert Team with BCStrategies, and we take turns contributing our perspectives to No Jitter. It’s my turn this week, and with all the industry events I’ve been attending lately, there’s plenty to talk about. There are many stories to tell for how AI is being used in the contact center - some is transformative, and some is more incremental, but overall, it’s a dominant trend now.
I can only cover so much ground in one article, and over the course my recent work with vendors, I’ve provided a brief update on what four vendors are doing - Cisco, NICE, Twilio and Dialpad. Each really warrants its own article, and the same can be said for other vendors I’m following just as closely. My writeup is running now on No Jitter, and as always, comments and sharing are both welcome. If this piques your interest in a longer analysis, I’m not hard to find!
J Arnold & Associates is an Independent Technology Research and Analyst, helping businesses understand the strategic value of communications technology as they adapt to the digital transformation of work
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