Season 4 of Watch This Space continues with an episode titled “Copper Sunset – Why We’ll Be Losing More Than a Network”. This topic was spurred by recent news regarding British Telecom’s plans to decommission their copper telephony network, and is in line with similar plans in the US. While we take the universal access long-provided by the PSTN for granted, broadband access today is far from universal, which helps create the digital divide, where economic success largely depends on this access. We explore the implications of this, and how we’ll be losing more than a network when those copper telephony systems are taken out of service.

Flipping the switch from summer to fall seems much easier than coaxing workers to shift from home to office, and we explore what’s behind the current trend known as The Great Resignation. There are good reasons why many workers aren’t just not coming back to the office, but leaving their jobs altogether. Chris and I examine the role collaboration technology plays in all this, along with what else is needed to keep workers happy and in the fold.
For those of you who don’t subscribe to our podcast directly from a commercial platform, you can access it any time here on the new Watch This Space website.
If you don’t know where to subscribe to Watch This Space, it’s posted now on many of the leading platforms. More are in the works, and I’ll soon be adding links to all of these on the WTS website. Currently, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Stitcher.
The Watch This Space website will host our episodes for 2020 and beyond. The site is formatted specifically for podcasts, including an embedded player so you can listen directly from the site – check it out here: www.watchthisspace.tech. Our earlier podcasts – Seasons 1 and 2 – can be accessed here on my JAA website.

What’s Up? Part 2 – JAA Highlights from October

While the Watch This Space podcast is the main form of original content for this newsletter, Part 2 here is a digest of JAA activities from the previous month, including my other forms of original content, and my social media stats. More detail for most of these will be on my blog.

Virtual conference roundup – the fall virtual conference pace continued last month:
- NICE/inContact Analyst Summit, Oct. 6-7
- RingCentral 2021 Analyst Summit, Oct. 11-12
- UC Expo virtual, Oct. 13-14
- BT Annual Global Analyst Event, Oct. 13-14
- Google Cloud, Oct. 12-14
- Twilio Analyst and Influencer Summit, Oct. 18-19
- Cisco Webex One, Oct. 26-27
- Fuze productfest, Oct. 27 – despite being on my calendar, I wasn’t able to track the sessions due to a subsequent travel situation that came up on short notice
Podcast – our latest BCStrategies podcast was a review of the Enterprise Connect event
Webinar – I did another SCTC Fireside Chat, this time about the “magic” behind the Gartner Magic Quadrant
Video #1 – I did a Twitter Live broadcast in New York City, in conversation with Andy Purdy, CSO of Huawei USA – details on my blog, including a link to watch on demand
Video #2 – for the UC Expo in the UK, I was interviewed via video, providing my insights about a session moderated by colleague Zeus Kerravala – I didn’t blog about it, but you can watch the full session moderated by Zeus, along with my interview, which starts at the 39:20 mark – here’s the link
White paper – I wrote a white paper for Cisco about how customer experience is evolving – while it was published in April 2021, it hasn’t been publicly shared until recently – during last month’s Webex One event, the white paper was included in their Resources offerings, and here’s the link to access the white paper
Perspectives on customer experience - in support of last month’s CX Day event, Genesys compiled perspectives from various analysts, including myself, on the importance of CX and why it needs to be a priority for contact center leaders – see my Oct. 5 blog post for more detail, including a link to our perspectives
Writing roundup – summary of public writing is here, with only one this month - my latest for No Jitter: “Return to Office Challenges: What Workers Want”
Media citings – had two of these last month
Social media highlights - since these stats change every day, the metrics are just a basic snapshot, but they provide a good sense of reach beyond my blog and newsletter. For my business, I use Twitter and LinkedIn, and here are some approximate tallies for October:
- For LinkedIn – I had 21,568 views and 38 posts – tallies are up quite a bit from September
- My top LinkedIn post registered 1,357 views and overall, 11 posts had 500+ views
- For Twitter – there were 17,800 impressions, 2,271 profile visits, 31 mentions, 53 tweets, and 11 new followers – trends are up somewhat from September
- My “top tweet” was about Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson during a session with analysts, with 796 impressions, and 9 tweets had 500+ impressions
Updates were recently added about my musical interests, with both new video clips and photos. You can find all this on the My Music tab, and I continue to mention this here in case new subscribers don’t know about my fun side.

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for November

As with October, I have a full slate of events to track – several of these have in-person options, but I’ll be doing them all virtually:
- SCTC Annual Conference, Nov. 1-4 – in person!
- Mavenir – Nov. 9
- Genesys – Nov. 9-10
- Slack Frontiers, Nov. 16-17
During the SCTC conference, I’ll be doing the lock note talk on Thursday, and as part of the SIPtones, we’re performing Tuesday night
For the Future of Work Expo coming this February, I’m returning as Chair, and there’s lots in play for lining up speakers for the program – here’s the Agenda page - please get in touch to learn more, either for speaking or sponsoring
In terms of client work, here are the highlights for active projects:
- For a leading cloud provider, I’ve written two pieces – one will run on a major publisher’s site, and one will run on their blog site
- My 6-part blog series for a contact center vendor concludes this month
- Completed a white paper about CPaaS – publishing soon, along with a companion webinar
- New engagements that should be ready to start in November will be a mix of work, including a consulting role for marketing strategy, another one that is analyst-based, a new podcast for the channel community, a white paper for a cloud provider, and a series of short and mid-length writeups for a contact center vendor.

Hey Did You Know....

…it takes a lot of planning to manage all these virtual events. As with last month, here are some of my screenshots from the various events I was tracking.

NICE CEO Barak Eilam, RingCentral executive roundtable