With Avaya ENGAGE quickly approaching, we decided to check in with ConvergeOne thought leaders—who will be presenting at 27 sessions during the event—to get a sense of what we can expect. These are the primary themes that emerged.
The Path to Innovation with ConvergeOne + Avaya
David Lover, Vice President, Strategy + Technology: “A lot of my focus is on technology trends and customers’ adoption of those trends. This helps me identify key success factors that I can use to formulate a plan to help customers use technology to their company’s benefit. I have several breakout sessions at Avaya ENGAGE this year, and they all tend to be “Intro to…” type sessions. I find there are a significant number of customer who don’t even make it to step 3 or 4 or 10, because they are having a hard time getting started with step 1. I like to show how easy it is to eliminate those early hurdles. If I can help them get excited about getting started, I find they do a great job finishing the project and are headed down a solid path of deploying innovation to their end-users and their customers.
Chris Clauss, Manager, UC Engineering Professional Services Delivery: “We’re seeing how platforms can be extended to provide a rich UC experience for customers’ Aura infrastructure. The Avaya Equinox ecosystem, coupled with new applications running on Breeze, allows the Aura environment to solve the workflow problems customers face.”
David Franz, Technical Training Specialist: “A lot of discussions exist about new technologies, digital transformation, and the use of SIP, but when all the discussions end, our customers are still tasked with keeping their systems running at their peak performance. For two decades now, I’ve been blessed to be able to deliver sales, design, implementation, and administration training to some of the best and brightest Avaya customers and their administrators. It’s my distinct pleasure to work with my fellow Avaya ENGAGE attendees to explore new ideas, new designs, and different ways to get and keep everything working at its best.”
Bob Kent, Director, Solutions Architects: “I think the main theme during the event will be unprecedented change. New applications like Team Collaboration and Real-Time Agent Assist offer enterprises returns on investment that we have not seen in a long while. This unprecedented change in our technology space will require IT and lines of business to grow beyond their current mindset.”
Andrew Prokop, Strategic Enterprise Architect: “Avaya solutions meet the needs of today’s enterprises and will continue to do so well into the future. Be it team collaboration, artificial intelligence, cloud communications, or the Internet of Things, Avaya and its partners are on the forefront of the technologies that are revolutionizing how the world does business.”
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Digital Transformation / Digital Disruption
David Franz, Technical Training Specialist: “No discussion will be complete without including transformational technologies and where they fit in current networks and systems.”
Bob Kent, Director, Solutions Architects: “The theme that ties all three of my presentations together is that they deal with how enterprises can harness disruptive technologies. There are more disruptive technologies in play right now than at any other time that I can remember—AI, cloud, IoT, and team collaboration, just to name a few. I hope to help folks understand how to understand the disruptive technologies, what their impact will be, and how to evaluate them so their enterprises can effectively put them to use in their environments.”
David Lover, Vice President, Strategy + Technology: “We’ve got some early-but-strong adoption and curiosity around topics like IoT, artificial intelligence and machine learning, automation, and even blockchain. The great news is that Avaya has some fantastic products that allow partners like ConvergeOne to create some powerful solutions for our customers.”
Andrew Prokop, Strategic Enterprise Architect: “This year, I am presenting at five Avaya ENGAGE sessions. While at first glance my topics might seem all over the map, the underlying theme is digital transformation — everything from building transformational solutions with Avaya Breeze to understanding the importance of blockchain.”
Kathy Sobus, Senior Director, Customer Experience Strategy: “Technology is moving at such a rapid pace that large enterprises are having difficulty keeping up, let alone moving forward. They realize that if they don’t transform, and do it quickly, that it will indeed affect their profit and growth. Dealing with this transformation requires much more than just creating a strategy, but executing on it, and the next two years are key. The digitally savvy companies will leave the traditional ones behind.”
Cloud
Chris Clauss, Manager, UC Engineering Professional Services Delivery: “We are seeing a dramatic movement from premises-based solutions to the cloud, with partners like ConvergeOne providing a turnkey cloud solution to customers.”
Bob Kent, Director, Solutions Architects: “Cloud is casting its shadow over everything and enterprises now have consumption models that will allow them to select and deploy easier and faster than ever before.”
Steve Romanelli, Solutions Architect: “The move to the cloud will be a main theme. The challenge for all of us is the various definitions of the cloud. Working for a leader in delivering cloud solutions, I look forward to the opportunity to discuss the various cloud architectures. This knowledge will empower clients to determine which cloud architecture is the best fit to meet their specific goals.”
David Franz, Technical Training Specialist: “I agree with my peers that almost every conversation at ENGAGE will include the use of the cloud – in whatever form that entails – to increase the ease of implementation and management of current and future systems.”
Evolving the Customer Experience
Dan Burgin, Customer Experience Solution Architect: “Gartner predicts that by 2021, 85% of customers will interact with the enterprise without a human. How could that be accomplished? AI and chatbots are the logical answer. Customer experience chatbots have the potential to reduce customer contact costs by large percentages, saving millions for large centers. They can also reduce the drudgery on agents having to perform repetitive simple queries, all while increasing agent satisfaction, and raise end-customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. But building, training, and maintaining an effective AI-driven chatbot requires a platform, an approach, a training methodology, good access to current data to inform interactions accurately, and escalation to human agents that is automatically flexible and manageable.”
Kathy Sobus, Senior Director, Customer Experience Strategy: “The major trends that will arise during this event will involve self-service enhancements—web, mobile, voice devices, and chat—and how we are enhancing voice with new strategies to help us understand the customers’ intent and path or journey they took while trying to satisfy their own requests. Additionally, once customers decide they need to communicate with an agent, the tools at the agent’s disposal are so vitally important. I believe we’ll be hearing more about these things during Avaya ENGAGE.”
Security
Chris Clauss, Manager, UC Engineering Professional Services Delivery: “My session, ‘Certificates, System Manager, or Your CA,’ focuses on the need for security and encryption within Unified Communications environments. Customers are becoming more vigilant about securing their systems, and UC teams need to understand how this is accomplished to meet the compliance requirements they face.”
VISIT CONVERGEONE AT BOOTH #409 +
SIGN UP FOR A ONE-ON-ONE SESSION
DURING AVAYA ENGAGE
We look forward to continuing the conversation at Avaya ENGAGE, so make sure to visit us at Booth #409! Want to dive deeper into one of the areas our thought leaders discussed here? Sign up for a one-on-one discussion on digital transformation, cloud, customer experience, or security – and check out the full list of our speakers' presentations.
Topics: Cloud, Security, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Avaya
