Wondering what your options are when one of your traditional communications vendors suggests you rip out your legacy Nortel infrastructure so you can replace one proprietary platform with another? Why spend more money to be vendor-locked, have to retrain your team, and disrupt your end-users lives with a new expensive plastic phone that they didn’t request?

Millennials are different from the rest of us - and that is promising! 

According to Acosta research, Millennials - the generation born between 1981 and 1996, Millennials are generally globally minded, optimistic and tolerant. They grew up in a digital era with access to the Internet, mobile services, social media, streaming media, and smartphones. 

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.

It’s no secret we are in the middle of a mobile revolution. There’s a mobile app we can download to our smartphones designed to make just about any activity in our modern lives more convenient, more productive or more organized. Or more connected to our friends, family, colleagues … and the world in general!

In the past, the audiences and market challenges of two significant industry events – Mobile World Congress (MWC) and Enterprise Connect (EC) – rarely intersected.

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.

While M-Commerce has been all the rage over the last ten years, “M-Customer” is a term I’m coining in this column to describe customer engagement experiences through mobile devices. The innovation here has just begun and is closely linked to M-Commerce but pertains as much to customer retention and loyalty as it does to making the initial sale.

Earlier this year, I was blessed to be introduced to Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer of Samsung, when he delivered a keynote address at GENBAND’s Perspectives14 customer and partner summit in Orlando. I was drawn in to his vision for wellness enabled by such innovations as Samsung’s Gear Fit device, and Life Fit application embedded into the Galaxy S4.

Over-the-Top (OTT) service providers, like Skype, Google, WhatsApp and Netflix are riding on top of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) capex-intensive infrastructure by delivering Web and mobile competitive offers either directly (pure OTT VoIP applications) or indirectly (embedding voice, video and messaging into social, mobile, or gaming apps).  

Everything in the communications industry is changing – again.  Today, GENBAND is formally launching Kandy and after opening this powerful “Platform-as-a-Service” to a handful of our partners as part of an “early access” program, tonight we will be sharing their applications, which will prove to the world that communicating in real-time will never be the same. Those partners include massive companies like SAP, IBM and Tech Mahindra, as well as smaller start-up companies.