Impressions from Microsoft Ignite - Our BCStrategies Podcast

Been pretty busy lately with BCStrategies, where I’ve been a BC Expert for a long time. This is my third post this week regarding new content that I’ve been part of there, and if you haven’t visited the site lately, there’s lots of great content to explore.

This time around, it’s our latest podcast, where Kevin Kieller led a discussion to take in our thoughts about the recent Microsoft Ignite event. If you attended or read about it, you’ll know that Mesh was the big story, and in my mind this is a strong signal from Microsoft that the post-PC world is coming, and they’re going to be setting the pace.

Aside from contributing to the conversation here, I wrote up my own review with photos about Microsoft Ignite in an earlier BCStrategies post, and you can read that here. First, though, you should check out our podcast - here’s the link - and if you want to weigh in with your own takeaways, we’d love to hear from you.

High Availability Direct Routing for Teams - BCStrategies Post

This is my latest guest post, running now on BCStrategies. Direct routing for Microsoft Teams has been a hot topic lately, and I’ve had a few opportunities to research and write about it. This one was sponsored by AudioCodes, and if you read it, you’ll see that the focus is primarily on the challenge of providing high availability telephony with Teams. When hosting in the cloud, this is harder to do than it looks, and if you’re wondering about how to address this, you may find this post a good read - here’s the link.

What Was Supposed to be Here by Now? Our Latest BCStrategies Podcast

Interesting topic for interesting times. Led by Joseph Williams, our team of BC Experts weighed in on technologies and changes we thought would have happened by now in the collaboration space. Pretty wide range of perspectives, and several that I think you’ll find surprising.

So, like the guy in the Farmers Insurance ad says, “we’ve seen a few things” - that’s us at BCStrategies, folks. Our group has seen lots of tech waves come and go, so we’ve got perspectives that Millennials will have to wait their turn for. That time will come, but instead of waiting 25 years, why not just listen to us talk about a few things for about 30 minutes?Bump, bu-bump bump bump!

My Microsoft Ignite Takeaways on BCStrategies - Their Vision for a Post-PC World

I managed to take in some sessions during last week’s Microsoft Ignite, including the main event - their annnouncement about Mesh, a mixed reality platform that brings the physical and virtual worlds together in ways that most of us have never seen or imagined before. Gamers may rule in this world, but yes, there will be applications in the collaboration space, and Teams is part of the story.

Longer-term, this could well be Microsoft’s big play for a post-PC world, so it’s a good strategy to establish themselves before that time comes. Lots to discuss, and I’m just scatching the surface in this post I put together last week for BCStrategies. It’s running now on their portal, and if you give it a read, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My Next Webinar with Huawei - 5G for Enterprise Digital Transformation

It’s a busy month for webinars, and here’s the next one - Wednesday, March 10 at 2pm ET.

Am back for another webinar hosted by Huawei, and it’s about the promise of 5G for carriers to help enterprises with digital transformation. This is a pretty broad topic, and I’ll be joined by two other panelists - Will Townsend of Moor Insights and Strategy, and Tony Rutkowski of Netmagic Associates - along with Sean Kinney of RCR Wireless News as moderator.

Should be interesting, and I hope you can join us - details are here to register.

Newsletter Time Again - March Issue - Podcast Too

2021 continues to be busy, and my monthly newsletter is the best way to keep tabs on what I’m up to, writing about and speaking about. The March edition of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review went out yesterday, and our latest Watch This Space podcast episode went live as well.

Subscribers would know all that by now, and otherwise, if you want to be in that group, it’s easy. For the newsletter, you can sign up here on my website, and you can get the podcast in two different ways. First, to hear the latest episode or earlier ones, just go to the Podcast section of my site, where you can also view transcripts created by Otter.ai. There’s also a standalone website for the podcast where you can listen to the most recent episodes via an embedded player, so there’s nothing the download.

The second way is to subscribe to Watch This Space, much like you can do as per above for my newsletter. At present, the podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Stitcher. Other platforms are coming soon, so stay tuned.

February Writing Roundup

How do you like that? As busy as I’ve been, I only had one writeup posted publicly last month. Don’t think that’s ever happened before, so this will be a really quick roundup. My March newsletter goes out this week, and if you’re a subscriber, you’ll see that I was quite busy last month on other fronts, namely video and podcasts. Writing is ceratinly core to what I do, but it’s really just one channel for sharing my work.

The Hybrid Workplace: New Opportunities for Collaboration, Part 2, No Jitter, Feb. 23

My Next Webinar with RingCentral - Video Killed the Telephone Call. Or Did It?

Busy month, and am doing another webinar with RingCentral - more specifically, their UK operations. Back in December, I did a webinar with them in the US on the topic of migrating premises-based telephony to the cloud. A lot of businesses are still in that situation, and not sure why or how they should make this change. That webinar was well-received enough to warrant doing an updated version focused on the UK market.

The webinar will be on Thursday, March 18 - right after St. Patrick’s Day - good plan, at 2pm GMT, which is 9am for me. Here’s the registration page if you’d like to join us, and if so, I’ll see you then.

The Hybrid Workplace - New Opportunities for Collaboration: My Latest on No Jitter

This is Part 2 in my look at how businesses need to be thinking about the emerging hybrid workplace model as we all cope with the pandemic. My prior post examined issues around return to office, and they’re quite different from those needed to support work from home.

Workers are stuck in the middle here, and employers need to find a healthy balance between both settings. Lots to consider, and Part 2 is running now on No Jitter. If you like my post and missed Part 1, you can read that here. As always, sharing and comments are welcome.

UC Today Video Panel - CPaaS Vendors and Tech to Watch in 2021

Well, this was fun. I was recently on a video panel with two colleagues - Blair Pleasant and Raul Castanon - hosted by Rob Scott of UK-based UC Today. The CPaaS space is obtuse and not well-understood, but it sure is booming. Doesn’t help to be led my companies with funny-sounding names that give no clues about what business they’re in - Twilio, Plivo, Sinch, etc.

We’ve seen this movie before, and if you haven’t checked lately, the share prices for the public players are on fire, and the rest of the world is just catching up. Don’t let the names fool you - these are smart companies doing cool things, and they’re just getting started.

Cue the walk-on music for analysts, whose stock-in-trade is digesting all this and explaining it to various audiences in various ways. I’ve been in that camp for a while now, and things like CPaaS keep our tribe pretty busy. We did our best here for our CPaaS moment, and kudos to Rob Scott for putting this toegether. It’s been making the rounds on social, and if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have more pressing questions vital to your company’s success, I’m not hard to find.

My Next Webinar with Mitel - 2021 Roadmap for Digital CX

I recently wrote a white paper for Mitel on the importance of digital CX - customer experience - for contact centers, and the impact of COVID-19 on what constitutes a good CX. The white paper has been well-received, and we recently did a Twitter chat on the topic, which was also well-received.

We’re topping all this out now with a webinar, which will be on Thursday, March 4. I’ll be presenting highlights from the white paper, and along with Mitel’s Matt Clare, we’ll be talking about the current state of digital CX, and how contact centers should be thinking about their roadmap. You can register here to join us in real time, and if you can’t make it, the webinar will be available on demand from Mitel shortly after.

A Conversation About Conversational AI - Our Latest BCStrategies Podcast

Conversational AI is a phrase you’re going to come across regularly as you start looking at the bigger picture for voice in 2021. It’s central to my research, but I’m hardly alone in trying to understand where voice fits into a world that is becoming shaped around AI.

Wherever you are on the spectrum of the intersection of voice and AI, I would encourage you to give our latest BCStrategies podcast a listen. This edition was moderated by Blair Pleasant, with 7 BC Experts weighing in, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. Here’s the link, and you can be sure this won’t be the last time we explore this topic during 2021.

Guest Spot on Rob Barlow's Unleash The Potential Video Podcast

Toronto-based Rob Barlow produces a video podcast, and last week he had me on as a guest. Rob is a long-time telecom/tech veteran, and we’ve been recently exploring ways to work together locally. Even though I’m based in Toronto, I’m less well-known in Canada than the US, so Rob asked me to explain a bit about my practice. Otherwise, we talked about how the varoius technologies I follow are shaping not just the world of work, but our daily lives.

We kinda gravitated to the “future is friendly” theme, a well-known tag line TELUS has been using in their marketing for years. The episode has been posted now to Rob’s YouTube channel, and it can also be picked up on Spotify. Hope you like it!

Newsletter Time Again - February Issue - Podcast Too

It’s time for the next edition of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review, along with the latest episode of Season 4 for our Watch This Space podcast.

If you’re new to my newsletter, I should mention that I’ve recently added an archive section here on my website for earlier issues. At the moment, the 2020 newsletters are there, and soon the 2019 issues will be added as well.

Subscribers got the February newsletter earlier today, and if you want to keep tabs on what I’m seeing and doing in this space, it just takes a moment to subscribe here. The visual below will give you a good idea of what our latest podcast is about, and you can check it out here. Feel free to explore our earlier podcasts, and I’m in the process of adding Watch This Space to the major commercial platforms where podcast fans can subscribe directly.

January Writing Roundup

January turned into a good month to do some re -setting for 2021, and that has been time well-spent. Writing was on the light side, but that won’t last long. Whether you’re new here, or not sure if you missed something of mine from last January, here’s my monthly digest of writing highlights.

Voice-Enabling Microsoft Teams - the UCaaS Opportunity, guest post for SIPPIO, Jan. 22

Harnessing Diversity and Inclusion in Technology Key in 2021, TechTarget, Jan. 22

The Hybrid Workplace: New Opportunities for Collaboration, No Jitter, Jan. 19

How is Remote Work Affecting Enterprise Telephony?, TechTarget, Jan. 15

Embracing Contact Center AI in 2021, Insight Report for Upstream Works, Jan. 14

Unified Presence - the Real Challenge for Cross-Platform Collaboration, guest post for NextPlane, Jan. 13

Voice-Enabling Microsoft Teams - the UCaaS Opportunity - My Latest Guest Post

I produce many forms of thought leadership, including guest posts on blog sites, often for vendors in our space. To be clear, I don’t write about their products - that’s not what I do - but instead focus on the business problems their customers are having, and the role that new technologies and cloud offerings can play to address them.

My latest along those lines is for SIPPIO, a company I’ve written about before. They’re doing good things in the direct routing space, especially for MSFT Teams, in partnership with AudioCodes. That’s all I have to say about that, and will now steer you to my guest post now running on their blog. It’s gated, btw, so you’ll have to fill out the reg form to get it, but it just takes a moment.

The Hybrid Workplace - New Opportunities for Collaboration: My Latest on No Jitter

Future of work is a growing part of my focus as an analyst, and the hybrid workplace model is right in the middle of all that. It’s a big topic, and every thread of research leads to more threads. My latest post for No Jitter views this through the lens of opportunities for collaboration vendors. They’re very good at enabling communication and collaboration, but enterprises face bigger challenges to balance work from home with return to office.

Both trends will be big in 2021, and my take on this will cover two posts. The first one looks at return to office, and it’s running now on No Jitter. I’ll be following that up in my next post, looking at the work from home scenario. Enterprises have to do a lot of things right to make this hybrid model work, and I hope these posts will help them get there.

Best Practices for Video Meetings - Our Latest BCStrategies Podcast

We’re on a roll lately at BCStrategies, this being our third podcast over the past few weeks. I hope you caught the last two - 2020 highlights, and our look-ahead for 2021. They’re easy to find on our portal, as is our current podcast - best practices for video meetings.

Every vendor has a video story now, but that doesn’t mean it has to be all video, all the time. In my view, video has its place, and should only be used if it’s additive to the meeting. Of course, video helps home-based workers feel more connected to their teams, so it’s not just about having another communications channel at our disposal.

Best practices can mean many things, and if you’re looking for ways to make your video meetings more productive, I think you’ll get a lot from our collective take on the topic. Here’s the link to the replay, and kudos to Blair Pleasant for moderating. As always, comments and sharing are welcome.

Unified Presence - the Real Challenge for Cross-Platform Collaboration - Guest Post for NextPlane

My latest guest post looks at the nature of presence, and its role in collaboration. If everyone is using the same platform, it’s not problematic, but the reality is that most of us work across multiple platforms, and presence doesn’t natively tie across them.

This undermines the utility of presence, and by extension, the utility of UC. That’s the space NextPlane plays in, and hopefully this post will help UC decision-makers better recognize the problem set, and think differently about it. My post is running on their Blog page now, and as always, comments are welcome.

2021 Predictions for the Collaboration Space - Our BCStrategies Podcast

Our last BCStrategies podcast reviewed our parting thoughts on 2020, and now it’s time to look ahead to the year in front of us. The collaboration space sure was a moving target last year, and we expect more of the same in 2021.

The pandemic is still shaping the world of work, and both vendors and buyers are trying to make the right bets - can workers still be productive from home, will they want to come back to the office, how can businesses adapt to these changes? Lots of quesitons, and no shortage of answers from our group, so we hope you give our latest podcast a listen.