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. It also provides us with the opportunity to show off the awesome innovation that is continuing to occur at GENBAND.

Each year we raise the bar higher and higher at our Perspectives event, in large part due to our attendees demanding more and more. Perspectives is a year-round effort and I have a great team supporting and working with me to ensure that we put on a world-class program. Working with our leadership, key team members throughout the organization as well as our customers and partners -  we leverage their relationships to try to select the best possible presenters, who will not only have the attendees talking about their sessions, but more importantly thinking about the rapid pace of change in the industry and where their organizations fit in. We also want to continually demonstrate how GENBAND is helping our customers navigate, successfully compete and continue to win in a very challenging environment.

There are several things about Perspectives16 that I’m extremely excited about - from the world-class line up of speakers from leading organizations such as Verizon, Vodafone, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM to the awesome entertainment that we have planned.  Mid-last year, I had the opportunity to attend TEDWomen Conference in Northern California. One of the keynote presenters was Dr. Margaret Heffernan, CEO, entrepreneur, author and columnist for The Huffington Post and Inc.com. I came away from her presentation so impressed that I immediately thought of her as the perfect keynote presenter for our audience at Perspectives and luckily she was available to graciously accept our invite. I have no doubt that our guests will be as impressed with her as I was.

This year’s featured entertainment will be iconic rock band Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas. Their music has really stood the test of time and remains popular even today, so I know they will be a huge hit. I’ve already received excellent feedback from attendees with whom I’ve spoken to about the presenters and entertainment.

I’m also really excited about our first Kandy Hackathon at Perspectives sponsored by AT&T. There is already quite a bit of buzz from developers who are looking to put their skills to the test to see what kind of creative apps they can bring to life using our Kandy platform.  I’m looking forward to the innovative creations that our hackathon participants will come up with.

To help incentivize our hackathon participants we are providing the top three teams with the opportunity to record a 30-second video pitch of their solution. The video will be showcased on the Perspectives16 main stage on May 3, where conference attendees will vote for the winning solution to be demoed live on stage May 4 during the kick-off session. It should be a lot of fun for our enterprising Kandy developers and show our audience members some of the creative uses of Kandy.

Some of the key themes for this year’s event will be Communications Platforms and APIs; NFV and network virtualization; and Unified Communications and collaboration. I’m sure there will be others but these are ones that GENBAND and some of our strategic partners are focusing on. 

Perspectives would not be possible without the support of our sponsors - thanks to each one for their valuable contributions in making Perspectives such a unique event.

If you are attending Perspectives, I strongly encourage you to stop by our Solutions Showcase where GENBAND, our sponsors and partners will be demonstrating groundbreaking new technologies. As you can see we have a great show planned and hopefully I will get the opportunity to see you in Orlando!

Bita