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Voice assistants and chatbot penetration continues to grow, creating not only a demand for new AI applications and voice-enabled devices, but also ensuring voice’s future as a critical business communications channel. That creates and opportunity to leverage current and emerging AI technologies to create innovative new business models. This session will look at what is currently possible with AI-based interactions, what isn’t and what is on the horizon based on what we want (and what we think we want).
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Microsoft, Slack, Zoom, Cisco and several other brands are doing their best to bring Unified Communications to the mainstream. Collaboration tools from these vendors, including video, conferencing, enterprise collaboration, chat, whiteboarding and more, are gaining widespread acceptance in the workplace. But there’s a problem: Their vision of collaboration does not play well with the traditional PBX. Microsoft with its Skype successor, Teams, has made the largest impact. With more than 15 million daily active users (and growing, including the migration of 50 million Skype for Business users, is creating a real conflict for businesses. Businesses want the new communications tools, which are often part of their Office 365 licenses, but adopting the Teams model may mean giving up PBX features on which they rely, because it’s confusing and inefficient to operate two separate communication systems. This session will explore this trend in detail by comparing the latest offerings from the new world of UC&C, considering real-world deployment models, offering options for enterprises looking for the best of both worlds, and discussing what the future holds.
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If you’re an MSP, consider your business a prime target for sophisticated hackers. You don’t want your company to be the gaping hole in your customers’ security posture. It’s not only detrimental to them, but consider the devastation to your reputation and ability to ever build trust again. How can you effectively protect your business from malicious attacks to keep your customers safe? How do you develop and implement an effective security posture? What tools do you need to ensure security standards are always being maintained? What strategies do you need to ensure today’s efforts aren’t lost tomorrow as threats evolve?
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This quickly "matured" technology is a driving force enabling digital first firms to embrace the cloud and optimize operations. This panel discussion brings industry leaders together to take stock of where SD-WAN is as a technology and where it has to go.
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This session will discuss the development and creation of the voices behind AI-driven applications.
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There are hundreds of ways for people to communicate, but the gold standard is still email — no business can imagine eliminating email from their workflows. But, everyone agrees it can be improved. What’s the next advancement? Open source, collaborative email. This session will discuss the future of open source email, the increased security it provides, what it means for teams who work across oceans or across cubicles, and the benefits of collaboration tools for businesses of all sizes.
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comScore predicts that voice will be used for half of all searches by next year, and Gartner goes even further, saying that 30% of all searches will be done without even a screen. For businesses looking to engage their customers in the most efficient and desirable way, that means they had better get their AI development hats on quickly. This session will help businesses discover how to use AI with existing APIs and services to build rich conversational experiences for users.
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In every workplace, there are cultural, personality, generational and geographic divides that make collaborating hard. At one end of the spectrum, there is real-time collaboration and, at the other end, there is collaboration on your own time (great for those who don't like dealing with people or who manage disparate team). These represent synchronous and asynchronous collaboration that are driven by a proliferation of business messaging tools. The question is, how do you get more out of these tools, particularly for those who don’t enjoy a lot of online chatter? The answer is knowing how to pair the difficulty of each task with the right collaboration medium. Binary answers need simple collaborative options, while more complex review tasks need richer approachs, including screen sharing and virtual face-to-face exchanges. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you hate interacting with people, because business messaging tools are bringing us closer together in ways that work best for our personal needs. This session will discuss these different approaches and how to get the most from them.
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The technology driving customer service has changed dramatically over the past decade, and now perhaps even more than ever with the emergence of AI as a CX asset. But, that does not take away the human element of customer relationships, which, ultimately are driven by human engagement. This session will consider the role AI and automation technology plays in creating a positive customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, and creating revenue opportunities by integrating AI with human interactions. How can AI be leveraged to complement human engagement, not replace it.
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Over the next several years, nearly three-quarters of the workforce will be comprised of Millennials. Businesses have been aware of this developing trend for years. They know the ways Millennials work, use technology, and incorporate other tools such as AI and the cloud into their daily routines, is strikingly different from previous generations. The modern business should be making plans to adapt to their increasingly Millennial workforce, if they aren’t already in the process. This session will discuss the future of communications, the new disruptive workforce, and solutions that will enable enterprises to meet the needs of their entire workforces.
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The SD-WAN marketplace delivers Baskin Robbins'-like options, with the space lacking standardization. The industry has called for standards for some time, and this past year the MEF has been working diligently to deliver. MEF leadership will walk attendees through the development of this process, and expectations of evolution over time.
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Mobility is a key engine for business growth, paving a foundation for Digital Transformation and delivering more intelligence to mobile workforces. These technologies enable better customer service, new revenue opportunities, operational efficiency, and greater employee satisfaction – if they are deployed in ways that accommodate the need of both business teams and IT that must manage them. This session will discuss the Digital Transformation needs of all key stakeholders, the questions that every business should ask to understand workflows and application requirements, and the steps required to develop an effective and forward-thinking strategy for Digital Transformation that ensures positive outcomes while accounting for future needs.
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Digitalization is dramatically changing the IT landscape. IDC says that digitization — improving efficiency and reducing cost by moving analog processes to digital platform — represents a $7 trillion opportunity. This session will offer simple ways MSPs can evolve and build their businesses so as not to risk losing a large share of their addressable market. Panelists will offer insight on how to best stack and integrate technologies to successfully create a digitized platform and deliver a modern service offering.
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This panel discussion will explore the early paces of the SD-WAN research/deployment process, illustrating the boxes in need of checking when exploring SD-WAN options to ensure optimal results.
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Today’s IT services landscape can be confusing for MSPs looking for an edge over their competition. What services offer the best opportunities for market share and revenue growth? Which ones make the most sense to integrate into existing service offerings? What are the best vendor selection strategies? What is the best customer acquisition strategy? Is it better to specialize or generalize? This session will discuss the opportunities that await MSPs and how they can most effectively take advantage of them to build their businesses.
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While the SD-WAN marketplace offers options, it is important to place priority on security. Whether it is embedded in your SD-WAN solution or you're forced to overlay security, it's critical to do so with the best fit for your firm. This panel discussion will explore the security side of your software-defined WAN.
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This session features a business that believes CX is the new competitive battleground. Greater competition and growing consumer power have eroded traditional product- and service-based differentiation, forcing firms to seek new, more durable forms of competitive advantage. CX is the only sustainable source of competitive differentiation. With this goal in mind, SimpleTire set out provide information to its customers at a speed ‘Faster than Real Time.’ The wise say you can’t predict the future but, the fact of the matter is that we must, or we can’t keep up with the present. When a customer needs help, companies need to know a great deal ahead of “real” time in order to make decisions quickly enough. This session explores the process SimpleTire went through to accomplish that by creating a system to convert (a) text to speech, (b) speech to text, and (c) intelligent conversation with customers using chatbots.
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The shift of UC to the cloud has improved efficiencies and costs, but often has failed to improve communications and collaboration for the growing mobile workforce. Current “PBX-era” OTT mobile UC solutions have low adoption because they fail to deliver the usability and quality needed to drive significant use in today’s “smartphone era.” This under-utilization of UC platforms wastes enterprise investment and leaves mobile workers unbound by corporate IT management and compliance controls. In today’s highly competitive UC market, the winners will be those who leverage their networks to deliver a more mobile-native UC experience. Takeaways from this session include understanding how the workforce is changing from deskbound to mobile and remote, how enterprises can meet the needs of the mobile workforce, and an evaluation of different market approaches for mobile UC.
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Most major companies acknowledge that consumerization of enterprise technology is changing the way we work and is also critical to our future success. It is transforming how we compete in the marketplace, interact with customers and mobilize our workforce. Many of these same organizations have commenced significant initiatives to pursue a ‘future way of working.’ Yet, according to PwC’s study of 1,200 organizations in 79 countries, only 10% have a strong narrative around ‘The Future of Work.’ At PwC, we keep hearing similar questions from our clients: What actually is ‘The Future of Work’? Is this a discrete program or something we should build into other planned initiatives? How much should we invest in it? How do we go about it?
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Augmented reality and virtual reality have drawn a lot of attention so far for their uses in gaming and entertainment. However, both technologies are still relatively new in the business world. That’s about to change. Soon businesses will be able to use AR and VR for numerous practical tasks, from device maintenance to collaborative design meetings, bringing the potential to transform and improve collaboration. This session will discuss the evolution of AR and VR into business technologies, current innovation underway, and lessons already learned from early experimentation. The results are surprising.
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As the AI market has developed and matured, there are more tools available with the promise of improving your workplace. It’s an important decision for the CIO and IT management team. The right tools can help you build a future-proof workplace. The wrong tools will disrupt your culture and cause users to be skeptical of future updates. How do you determine which tools will fit your organization and drive productivity and which ones to carefully evaluate? This panel of AI leaders from disruptive companies will discuss best practices for evaluating your organization and identifying the tools that will automate the mundane and fuel creativity and collaboration.
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There are a host of UCaaS providers competing for new business from companies large and small. They offer a wide range of telephony, UC, collaboration, and productivity features designed to enhance business communications – and confuse buyers who have to decide between solutions that may seem very similar. But, there are some features that are nice-to-haves, and others that are must-haves. Business leaders have to be able to differentiate between the two, and first consider those factors that are indispensible for their organizations, including both business objectives and IT requirements. This session will help businesses understand how to balance critical IT needs like security, reliability, and scalability with user needs like mobility, messaging, conferencing, and more.
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Despite the massive opportunity today’s IT service market presents, many MSPs are struggling to succeed. In fact, for every four new customers, MSPs in the U.S. lose three existing ones, stunting growth. At least some of the churn can be attributed to untrained technicians. As quickly as the cloud services market has grown, keeping up with demand has meant providers have had to expand their hiring pool to younger, less experienced techs, which has had an impact on customer satisfaction. What is the current skills gap in the MSP market? How is it really impacting service levels and growth opportunities? How can the gap be closed and how can MSPs adapt while that happens?
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Automation and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing operations, alleviating manual intervention, boosting performance, cutting costs and delivering efficiency to network operation.
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This session will consider the role of analytics in conversational interfaces and its unique nature compared to other engagement analytics. We’ll get into ways to effectively monetize AI applications through higher customer satisfaction rates by turning analytics data into actionable intelligence.
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Enterprise users are being bombarded with new tools that are supposed to make them more efficient and productive. But, are they really accomplishing that objective? Or, are they actually causing employees to waste more time on finding the right tools, locating colleagues, information, scheduling, and other tasks that actually reduce productivity? When deployed and used properly these tools are supposed to save time, empower workers, reduce redundancies, and generally make businesses operationally more efficient. This session will discuss how businesses can ensure that happens, from choosing the right solutions to strategies for maximizing adoption and utilization. The end result, when done right, is more work gets done with less effort, confusion, and frustration.
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More and more end users are looking to purchase services instead of products from their resellers and solution providers. This shift should cause solution providers of all shapes and sizes to take a hard look at their managed services offering. Whether you’re a VAR transitioning to an MSP model, an MSP looking to add more security to your offering, or an MSSP looking to continue to grow your business, there are several keys that will drive success. This session will discuss how to quickly and efficiently build a profitable managed security services practice with elements that will help solution providers better cater to their customers’ evolving needs, future-proof their businesses through recurring revenue and streamline operations with automation.
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Application performance is driving SD-WAN adoption. Service providers are pairing SD-WAN with UCaaS in the portfolio as a no-brainer value-add. The panel discussion with delve into how UCaaS is supported by SD-WAN, and why service providers are doing themselves a disservice by not bundling the two.
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For an MSP, adding SD-WAN to its arsenal of offerings is obvious. As MSPs embrace this transformative technology, there are still internal questions needing answers. This panel disussion will offer MSPs a basic blueprint for a newly sprung SD-WAN service provider -- from pricing to the portfolio.
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Imagine if the workforce were guided by the same turn-by-turn technology that we use to drive cars. Data is now firmly in the forefront of what we do and how we do it. Computers are increasingly taking on operational tasks, making room for people to add value in new ways. Are we on the cusp of data-driven systems that tell workers how to navigate at work? What tasks need to be completed? Which tactics will work best and how to adjust to changes along the way? What would these systems mean to the value of work, workers and people leaders? This session explores the the evolving world of work and its impact on technology and people, from the perspective of a Business Anthropologist.
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In an era of rapid change and disruption, companies need to apply the concept of the gig economy inside of their organizations to share talent across boundaries by dynamically matching and deploying skills to the work. This creates competitive advantage around an employee experience that both democratizes work and unleashes internal capacity. This session offers a new paradigm for work that informs organizations how to master business model disruptions, rather than get run over by them.
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From the early days of VoIP starting with Asterisk and through the advent of FreeSWITCH and on to WebRTC, Learn how the evolution of Software Defined Telecom has brought us a new era in communications like never before.
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Security is at the top of every business’ list of priorities – at least it should be. As voice applications continue to evolve and as user acceptance of and comfort with voice recognition grows, what implications does voice have for new security strategies? This session will discuss the advances in voice technology that can help businesses leverage voice as a security and authentication mechanism and build security into the conversational thread instead of requiring separate security transactions.
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Whether the goal is global scalability or simplified, effective and cost-efficient communications (or both), CPaaS is making digital transformation easier than ever, while providing investment protection for the future. This session will discuss why CPaaS is the wave of the communications future and why the flexibility and customization it enables is critical for businesses as they move into a new age of communications. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the value of APIs and SDKs, why customization is necessary, how it can be accomplished easily and without headaches, and how they can create a customized communications solution instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all system.
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As government agencies at all levels follow the Federal government’s lead and modernize their IT infrastructures, the share of budget going to cloud services continues to increase. This presents an opportunity for MSPs that are ready to embrace the opportunity. But it’s not as simple as simply launching a new service offering, and there can be confusion around what is effectively still a young process – getting government certified at local, state, and Federal levels. But, for those MSPs that accept the challenge and decide to go through the process, the benefits can be tremendous, launching them into not only the government market, but increasing their presence in the private sector as a result. What do MSPs need to know about delivering cloud to government customers? This session will discuss the challenges, their solutions, nuances of selling to the public sector, and the benefits to be achieved.
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SD-WAN is supporting multi-location businesses, enabling multi-cloud connectivity and driving business results. This panel discussion will offer insight in answering the difficult questions when it comes to international and remote location deployments, offering use cases and exmaples to illustrate the international nature of this sprawling tech.
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The emergence of AI and automation has created a natural uncertainty regarding job security. There’s no question AI is changing roles and the job market, but it’s also creating opportunities for employees to excel in ways they never have previously. This session will discuss the new job opportunities AI is creating, as well as ways AI is being used to facilitate jobs in a gig economy.
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As cloud computing continues to transform the IT services market and create new opportunities for MSPs to expand their offerings and increase their value, they are faced with one overarching question. How should they price their new service offerings? What pricing strategies should MSPs adopt in order to be competitive yet profitable and protect their revenue streams?
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SD-WAN is asserting impact in a big way, but with certain verticals come certain challenges. Industry experts will offer insight into various vertical deployments via use cases.
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Machine learning has been sweeping our industry, and the creativity it is already enabling is incredible. On the flip side, there has also been the emergence of technology, like Deep Fakes, with the possibility to spread disinformation. As a tool maker, is our technology neutral, or are we responsible for creating technology for good? How should we be thinking about biases of multiple forms when training AI? What can go wrong when learning is applied to indiscriminate user data? This session will consider these issues from multiple angles, weighing the positives of technology against their potential misuses.
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The age of conversational commerce is here, and the right communications technology tools are key to ensuring human agents are having meaningful interactions with customers at every touch point. With the increasing availability of open APIs, application and programmability capabilities are not an either/or equation anymore, and businesses today do not need to build everything from scratch to create a solution tailored to their needs. Next-gen APIs, enterprise applications and intelligent technologies allow brands to build innovative communications experiences for customers and increased productivity for the workforce. Intelligent communications can enhance the connection point between businesses and their customers, helping to drive better business outcomes. This session will illustrate how the unique combination of unified communications, contact center solutions and innovative programmable communications via APIs can empower brands to provide enhanced customer service through personalized and contextual communications, while enriching and streamlining human agents to be more productive. Learn how businesses are leveraging these tools to solve problems and address customer demands, all according to their unique preferences and needs.
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This session will discuss the impact of AI on the customer acquisition process, from marketing through sales execution. How is AI changing marketing strategy? How can automation be used to create more efficient and productive sales processes? What strategies should businesses follow to integrate AI into their sales and marketing workflows to increase conversion rates and customer retention?
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Traditional marketing is officially a thing of the past. Product and customer experience is officially the new “brand” that consumers recognize. But what does this mean for MSPs? This panel will discuss the new marketing paradigm that’s changing the approach for MSPs, and what new marketing strategies have proven successful – and what isn’t working. This panel of experts will discuss the impact of a new consumer-based decision model has on MSPs and how they need to adjust their marketing strategies.
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SD-WAN Expo 2020's final breakout session brings together Industry leaders to lend expertise to offer attendees the ability to see through the looking glass at what the future holds for SD-WAN.
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