It's my favorite time of year as GENBAND brings together hundreds of technology and telecom professionals at the top of their game to compare notes about the never dull worlds of networks and real-time communications applications, while sharing their experiences, and revealing visions into a future of hyper-connected digital conversations.

Conversations are key, whether they are being held in a live setting like the one our stellar marketing team has put together again, for the fifth year in a row now, or are being held a billion times each day between consumers, between consumers and brands, between citizens and governments, across more communications channels than we've ever seen in history.

Choosing channels and supporting "omnichannel" communications is an opportunity and challenge, and an area we have been focusing on and investing in intensely for years. With hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D behind GENBAND, partnerships with the world's leading tech giants (including companies like IBM and SAP), and a continually growing ecosystem enabling integration and interop, we have mastered the real-time communications cloud domain, and this is in large part due to the hundreds of service providers and thousands of enterprises and organizations we are so fortunate to work with and for every day. 

Being able to get together with them - this year in Los Angeles, California - is always a blast, and this year we're planning more excitement and educational sessions than ever.

You can learn more about Perspectives 17 here, including the exciting agenda for this five-day event, from July 16 - 20 this year.

Here are the top ten trends in cloud communications I'm personally looking forward to learning more about when the community comes together in July: 

1. The continuing evolution of "OTT" and the hundreds of real-time communications "as a service" challengers sprouting up all over the world, and causing service providers to rethink their models.
2. Identifying what assets service providers feel are the differentiators that they bring to consumers and businesses; is it their ability to provide differentiated, quality experiences and expand service offerings to an existing set of billing relationships?
3. The evolution of OSS/BSS in light of virtualization and how they can be leveraged to deepen subscriber and business relationships and enable rapid service creation.
4. Network economics and making the "jump shift" to monetizing investments in NFV and SDN for a faster, bigger return and how cloud-based micro-service architectures will play a role in providing highly scalable, resilient and data privacy compliant communications.
5. The heightened need for data privacy and security and how that will impact 2018 planning and budgets. 
6. The changing world of regulatory control, and the impact of potential upheavals to institutions including the EU as some countries chose to close not only their physical but digital borders. How service providers and independent software vendors in a crowded UCaaS, OTT and CPaaS market plan to compete with the Microsofts, What’s Apps and Twilios of the world.
7. The drive toward hybrid clouds and defining where & when public and private cloud deployments make sense.
8. What service providers feel is required to accelerate the transformation of PRIs to SIP Trunking and grow ARPU; is it overlay services, easier federation with other service providers for multi-national reach?
9. The convergence of UCaaS and CPaaS and the new found power of developers who are looking for more efficient ways to bring services to market which include embedded RTC and turnkey digital transformation apps.
10. Truly omnichannel, social Contact Centers which are rapidly becoming Context Centers. 

Speaking of context, what I find most exciting about Perspectives17 is that you never know which kind of mix you'll find yourself in. This is not a conference for traditional thinkers or doers. This is truly a "five day mixer" where software, hardware, middleware, applications and innovations oriented visionaries and entrepreneurs find each other and literally invent the future through human partnerships that lead to technical and commercial development. 

I'm proud to be presenting live demos of Kandy's cloud communications technologies, including the extremely popular "Wrappers" we have been creating and are rolling out into the market. We love what we do, and truly enjoy the collaborations we have with our customers and partners, including our channel partners, and there is no better place to celebrate all this in "3D" in LA in July. It's not to be missed! 

Looking forward to seeing you there.