Mobile World Congress is probably THE conference in the technology industry right now, with more than 100,000 people descending on the city of Barcelona for four days to showcase their latest and greatest. It has become so much more than a “MOBILE” conference. This year, I had the privilege of attending the show again to really get a feel for what’s hot in the industry and where things are going.

The majority of my time is spent helping our more than 700 service provider customers better serve their customers through more agile, efficient and powerful communications networks. Serving as the Chief Operating Officer of Network for GENBAND has given me unique insights into the issues and pain points that are facing today’s service providers. Every day my team and I help customers ranging from the largest operators in the world to rural service providers solve their communications issues and improve their networks.

If you find yourself more frustrated than ever while on a call or conference bridge…when you cannot quite make out what a participant is saying…when you are sharing your ideas only to learn a few minutes later your voice was barely legible…you’re not alone.

To meet the growth in real-time communications, service providers are increasingly moving to virtualize their networks and certain network functions.

Spring finally sprung in London last week with sunny days and temperatures in the 20s (70s).  It almost seems a shame to ask sun-starved Londoners to head indoors this week for one of the year’s biggest unified communications (UC) events, UC EXPO.  On the plus side, the good weather should ensure a busy event.  GENBAND will be showing off our UC and WebRTC solutions and will be supporting our newest

Last year we were extremely excited to join the HP OpenNFV Program as a Technology Partner.

Have we moved on from the idea of “Unified Communications” to “Optimized Real-Time Communications?” There’s a lot of chatter going on about the death of “UC” and the rise of “RTC” for businesses, and the notion that the desktop phone and PBX as we knew them are being systematically, if slowly, decommissioned in favor of the more sophisticated mobile devices now available. But it’s not just the devices, it’s the applications including security applications, and the movement toward embedding RTC into everyday workflow and platforms, including CRM.

In September I released the first version of my view of the current NFV landscape and ecosystems in an attempt to visually represent the key players in this movement.  Since the release of the initial version I have received some great feedback and have decided to update it for this quarter.

Key updates to the landscape include:

Enterprise communications continues to be one of the most important and mission-critical areas in most organizations today.  Providing global workforces with the latest in communications technologies is at the top of the priority list for most CIOs and IT leaders. 

I am attending the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in Dusseldorf this week and the event kicked off with the Open Network Foundation/Software Defined Networking (ONF/SDN) Workshop chaired by Marc Cohn of ONF/Ciena for an exciting week of the latest on SDN, NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and Open Networking.