Upcoming Shows
It’s Spring – time for shows again.
Obviously we just got done with VoiceCon – the big mama Enterprise Voice show.
Next up confirmed:
Ecomm April 19-21 San Francisco:
This will be my first time at Ecomm – from what I can tell, it’s about the polar opposite of VoiceCon. Ecomm – or emerging communications – is the bleeding edge of telephony – the not ready for prime time technologies. It includes an amazing line up of people talking about the future – the people creating it. I am very much looking forward to it – I’ve never seen such a packed show agenda. Keynotes and speakers from Google Voice, Bit Torrent, Skype, Telio, and more.
UCStrategies.Com UC Summit April 25-28 San Diego:
I’m having a blast working with the UCStrategies team – its been a migration for me from Pundit to Analyst. They put on this event for dealers and vendors to fine tune their UC message and practice. I really enjoy the UC/telecom conversations out of this group, but they get a bit diluted with ongoing conversations about wine. So if you are interested in UC or talking about wine or the movie Sideways – you should check out this event.
Unfortunately, at the same time is Interop in Las Vegas – that has been one of my favorites historically – but I haven’t been in years. They tend to focus on machine to machine communications instead of machine to voice and certainly not UC.
That’s as far out as I’ve booked, but a few other events on the horizon include:
GlueCon May 26-27 near Boulder:
There are not very many shows that I can attend that don’t involve an airplane – this is one. I went last year (you can see me in the photo on their home page!) and I was surprised on its quality and relevant content. The show is really about emerging APIs and the business of web development. Last year I met the folks from Twilio there who’ve I’ve since run into multiple times. The show is relevant because it addresses the emerging cloud models, telephony, networking, and many related topics in a refreshing approach. The show is not big or small – and has an impressive line up planned. Keynotes from companies like Twitter, Cisco, Google, and Paypal. Should be highly complementary to EComm.
Enterprise 2.0 June 15-17 Boston:
Enterprise 2.0 is a fascinating show – basically the non voice real time conversations that are taking place (or will be taking place) at work. They had an Enterprise 2.0 and VoiceCon together last Fall in San Francisco – that seemed odd at first, but really the two are very synergistic. This was even more apparent at the recent VoiceCon show with things like Twitter integration into the call center. Could be a good show.
OCS Forum Expo June 15-16, Boulder
This is a new show dedicated to Microsoft’s OCS product. It’s on my radar because its local, but it looks fairly detailed around technical administration.
ITExpo West October 4-6, Los Angeles
I went to my first ITExpo show last January in Miami and it was a blast. An amazingly energetic and excited crowd. Smaller businesses in terms of both target implementations and vendors, but production ready and real. What is interesting about ITExpo is the concurrent shows taking place – a Cloud Summit, a SmartGrid summit, AsteriskWorld to name a few. I hope they do another Start-Up summit (see prior blog post).
Astricon October 26-28 Washington DC:
I’ve gone to the past two Astricon’s and they are great shows. Though a humbling show, because I generally feel fairly knowledgeable about this industry. This show is a different level altogether. At most shows, open laptops in the audience are for tweeting or note taking – assume an open laptop here means someone is tweaking a live system somewhere.
