ENTERPRISE CONNECT 2023

This article was published on March 30, 2023

Enterprise Connect 2023 kicked off with 90 degree weather and equally hot news from Vonage.

DAYS THREE & FOUR

The final two days of Enterprise Connect saw several speaking opportunities for Vonage, including one keynote address on the Main Stage:

Tapping into Mobility

In this keynote address with Eric Krapf, Enterprise Connect Program Co-Chair, Vonage’s EVP Product & Engineering Savinay Berry provided insight into the recent acquisition of Vonage by Ericsson, as well as how mobility, hybrid work, 5G and AI are changing the way we work.

“True mobility occurs when you can connect from anywhere without worrying about the quality of that connection. We are at a disruptive moment in our industry. I believe what we’re seeing this year with AI - it’s real and there will be fundamental questions that we need to address about what this means for all of us and how this will be embedded into the way we work. It will be a great year to watch.”

John Antanaitis, VP of Portfolio Marketing took the stage for two panels:

From Composable to Customizable: How CPaaS is Enabling Applications and Integrations

This panel discussion covered lots of ground, from integrations between UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS to the role of low/no-code accelerators to the expected influence of ChatGPT and other large language models.

But what was refreshing for such a tech-centric panel was the focus on customers, the evolution of desired business outcomes, the rise of citizen developers and the drive to move from connections and conversations to true customer engagement. It was the perfect setting to share a couple Vonage customer success stories and to reinforce the value of our complete Vonage Communications Platform.

UCaaS Plus CCaaS: What are the Use Cases, Where are the Hurdles?

In this panel, led by Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion, Vonage VP of Portfolio Marketing John Antanaitis joined marketing peers in the industry to provide insight on the convergence of UCaaS and CCaaS - what’s driving this shift and where they’re seeing barriers to adoption.

“The closer you can integrate your UC solution, CRM, contact center - and the data between those - that’s where true customer engagement is born.”

How Reliable is Your Cloud Solution?

In this fireside chat, Vonage SVP Sales Engineering Sanjay Srinivasan joined a panel with moderator Steve Leaden of Leaden Associates, an independent communications and IT consultant, to discuss availability, SLAs, redundancy, and other factors that serve as the underlying architecture of a UCaaS, CCaaS, or other communications service.

“How we define reliability today has changed. Whether your service is up is no longer enough. Quality and security are equally important and, as we think about reliability, we need to ensure services are constructed to cover all these factors that impact reliability. Resilience of design is key. How the architecture is designed to recover quickly and make any issues invisible to customers - this is key to reliability.”

- Sanjay Srinivasan, Vonage SVP Sales Engineering

Day Two

Tuesday at Enterprise Connect was heating up with more Vonage customers and execs onstage, lending thought leadership on the rise of the hybrid workplace, building a consolidated communications platform strategy, leveraging low-code/no-code solutions for intelligent app development and more…

Enterprise Summit: Navigating a Changing Landscape

Once again, Vonage customer and University of Pennsylvania Technical Director JoDe Beitler took the stage with IT peers across different industries to discuss the new modern workplace.

“Most of our students and faculty operate on campus, while we are mostly hybrid on the admin side. Because of the way we all work - and learn - today, we rely on a mix of enterprise-wide solutions to accommodate everyone’s needs and keep them connected. Technology is fundamentally changing academics and we’re learning how to teach in this new world.”

- JoDe Beitler, Technical Director, University of Pennsylvania

Transforming Simple Connections into Memorable Customer Engagements

Sanjay Srinivasan, Vonage SVP Sales Engineering, took to the Expo Show Floor to showcase the power of the Vonage Communications Platform:

“Consolidating communications - UC, contact center, API building blocks, AI - on a single platform, with a single provider - gives businesses ‘one back to pat’ and enables them to receive the technology, services and support they need to create meaningful conversations with their customers.”

No Jitter News Desk

Savinay Berry, Vonage EVP Product & Engineering, joined the No Jitter News Desk to chat about the benefits of low-code/no-code solutions and how these tools are improving the developer experience and giving way to the democratization of intelligent app development for enterprises with limited IT resources. Check out the Enterprise Connect livestream for more.

Vonage Live

To round out the day, Vonage VP Portfolio Marketing John Antanaitis was live on the Vonage LinkedIn page to discuss the power of an integrated communications platform and how the Cloud can solve for enterprise challenges. See our LinkedIn page for the full presentation.

Whoa! We’re halfway there. Two more days to go at Enterprise Connect 2023. Check back here for updates.

Day One

Taking place in Orlando, Florida from March 27-30 this year, this annual show for the business cloud communications industry is a premier event for Vonage each year as we continue to drive awareness of the power of driving connection, conversations and exceptional experience through engagement solutions built from our communications platform.

As a leader in the business cloud communications, this show lends us the perfect opportunity to lend our perspective to our stakeholders - existing customers, prospective customers, industry analysts and influencers - on the future of communications technology, as well as how we are going to continue to deliver innovations that help our customers drive better engagement, more conversations and deeper loyalty in the year ahead.

Day one began with a big announcement from Vonage - the launch of Vonage AI Acceleration Suite, a portfolio of AI-capable, low-code/no-code programmable components that speed and simplify the development of applications that deliver smarter solutions to drive business productivity and better experiences and engagements. Integrating Vonage Communications APIs for voice, video, SMS and messaging, the AI Acceleration Suite allows businesses and developers to rapidly deploy rich, omnichannel customer journeys that use the power of AI and customer data to incorporate intelligence and automation into their customer experience applications.

Following this news, the morning proceeded with four of Vonage’s 10 speaking engagements:

UCaaS Migration Case Studies

Hosted by industry consultant Melissa Swartz, this panel featured Vonage customer and University of Pennsylvania Technical Director JoDe Beitler, who spoke about her organization’s partnership with Vonage in its migration from an on-premises solution to a UCaaS solution.

“With a very decentralized IT operation, we were looking to rebuild our platform with a UCaaS migration by partnering with a vendor that could meet our unique needs. Vendor support was a key motivating factor in our decision to partner with Vonage to get us where we needed to be. [...] We had planned to take about three years to upgrade our systems across campus, beginning in March 2020. The onset of the pandemic accelerated our UCaaS migration as we needed to shift to provide our staff with the ability to work from home - quickly. This gave us an immediate disaster recovery strategy for this unexpected event and enabled our staff to continue to work remotely.”

- JoDe Beitler, Technical Director, University of Pennsylvania

CCaaS Case Studies

Thomas Brannen, founder of OnConvergence, hosted a panel of business leaders discussing their move to a cloud-based contact center. Michael Moxley, Chief Service Officer of Goosehead Insurance, a Vonage customer and growing, independent personal insurance agency, offered some insight into their exceptional experience in migrating from a legacy provider to Vonage Contact Center:

“Decided to move our contact center to Vonage back in 2018. A big driver for this change from our previous supplier was all that Vonage could offer - simplicity and the ability to scale with our business, as we were growing fast. We also wanted cool features - AI and deep integrations in our CRM, as well as all the analytics that come behind that. Vonage helped us to reduce technical complexities within our contact center, with a single pane of glass to help our agents deliver a great insurance experience for our customers.”

- Michael Moxley, Chief Service Officer, Goosehead Insurance

Opening General Session: Hybrid Work, ChatGPT & More: Strategic Trends and Hot Topics

In this main stage general session, hosted by Jim Burton, CEO of C-T Link and Eric Krapf, Enterprise Connect Program Co-Chair, Savinay Berry, Vonage EVP Product & Engineering joined a panel of his peers to discuss the hottest trends facing the communications industry today.

“AI solutions to create chatbots are not new. But we are now seeing a real shift to make these chatbot interactions more human-like. Moving forward, it will take a hybrid approach to make this work in the future. Taking GPT-based platforms and marrying them with your own data - contact center, conversational AI - bring real value to customer use cases. [...] In a hybrid workplace, strong pre-COVID team connections have remained strong but we are seeing weaker connections with co-workers from groups outside of our core teams. The key to making hybrid work successful is to surface the right kind of data to hybrid and remote workers and prompt them with the right contextual action to make those ancillary connections stronger over time.”

- Savinay Berry, EVP Product & Engineering, Vonage

Women in Communications: Insight and Inspiration from Leaders

Rounding out the day was a women in tech-focused panel, hosted by Lisa Schmeiser, Enterprise Connect Program Co-Chair, that brought together IT professionals - including Vonage customer JoDe Beitler of UPENN - from various industries to discuss their careers paths through tech and how to close the gender gap in this traditionally male industry.

“Fostering and retaining women in tech is so important in the workplace today. But it needs to start earlier than that. Career fairs, Bring Your Child to Work Day - this kind of early exposure to options in the tech world - this is so vital to growing an interest in tech at a very young age. It’s important for young people to know that tech is for everyone. As allies, we should support women to seize opportunities in the tech world.”