Voicecon: Is the market ready for EnterpriseConnect

As Leigha noted, TechWeb is retiring the VoiceCon conference name this year, renaming its 20-year-old conference EnterpriseConnect. This is meant to reflect the changing nature of the conference. It’s pretty clear that VoiceCon isn’t just an enterprise voice show anymore. Unified communications, video, messaging, and collaboration are all hot topics at the show and on the exhibition floor.

Is this conference be defined by the vendors  who are pushing the envelope or by the technology professionals who are hear to learn?

I was chatting with Adam Boone, vice president of marketing for Sipera Systems yesterday (Sipera specializes in securing unified communications, especially voice). He noted that enterprises have only spent about 1/3 of the total projected global enterprise spend on IP telephony thus far. That means there are thousands of companies which are either still waiting to migrate to IP telephony or are still int he process of doing so. With that many people focused still on moving away from legacy voice, does the concept of EnterpriseConnect speak to them?

Perhaps.

I spoke to one voice project manager whose organization moved to IP voice four or five years ago. She was at VoiceCon to learn about UC, to figure out how to win budget to deploy UC. Her day-to-day working life is still focused almost 100% on voice and voice alone, but she is thinking about UC. I think this is the typical VoiceCon attendee today. Many of them are still very much voice professionals who are interested in learning about what they can do next with UC. VoiceCon is their show. A show for voice professionals who aspire to something more.