I’m not sentimental for the good old days as I typically embrace new technology, although I do recognize its impact.  In 1995, checking my messages meant checking voice mail from my desk phone, in 2000 it evolved to checking voice mail on my phone and e-mail on my PC, mostly in the office.  Today it means checking 6 or 7 different messaging platforms (including consumer tools and social networks) on 3 or 4 different devices – even if I’m on vacation in the most beautiful setting on earth.

It’s a presidential election year in Washington, D.C., having gone to college there and lived there for a number of years I know this is a special time.  It’s one of those years where you regularly overhear coffee shop conversations that include threats to “move to Canada if candidate X gets elected”.  Personally, when I hear this chatter I always feel bad for my Canadian neighbors to the North.

Back in early nineties, straight out of college, I began working on Wall Street building trading floor technology and trying to keep up with the growth of the public markets and innovation in platforms. In my early twenties, I was charged with engineering and evolving sophisticated trader voice applications, connecting thousands of participants – buyers, sellers, brokers, banks and, of course, exchanges.

GENBAND is hosting its fourth annual customer event again in Orlando this year, Perspectives16, kicking off today on May Day. Every year, this event welcomes hundreds of innovators and thinkers within the real-time communications industry from around the world, as it gets bigger, increasingly interesting and more meaningful. 

This year will be my third Perspectives Customer and Partner Summit since joining GENBAND and I am more excited than ever about this year’s conference.  Perspectives is our chance to bring our global customers and partners and members of the media and analyst community from all over the world into one central, relaxing location and provide them with a great venue to hear from some of the leading thinkers in our industry, network with others and have fun while doing so.

I’m really looking forward to my presentation at IBM Connect this week. The conference is the perfect venue to share with the IBM ecosystem family some of the innovative real-time communications solutions that GENBAND is bringing to market. My presentation, Embedded Technology and Collaboration, takes place at 3:30 pm on February 1. 

Over the past half-decade we’ve finally started to make some real progress simplifying deployment of Unified Communications (UC) and Collaboration.  First virtualization and now Cloud technologies have abstracted away much of the complexity of UC server deployments.  In the case of the Cloud, the burden has been shifted to third parties that focus on these tools so every organization is not forced to employ UC experts.

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

Huge communications service providers (CSPs) like Verizon, BT, and others have all announced plans to transform their massive core and edge networks to all IP over the next five years, as TDM takes more than just a back seat. TDM will be a buggy whip by 2020, as the enormous value of IP networking converging with IP applications truly takes hold.