After two years, the Enterprise Connect show returned to an in-person format in Orlando, Florida. Enterprise Connect is typically a show that communications vendors use to announce new products and features – and Amazon Web Services (AWS) did just that.
Enterprise Connect is back! One of the highlights I always look forward to are the keynotes, particularly Cisco’s as the speakers generally —but not always — deliver a good mix of vision and product. This year, Collaboration and Contact Center General Manager, Javed Khan, took the stage with appearances by SVP and GM Snorre Kjesbu and VP and GM of Cisco Calling, Lorrissa Horton, to discuss the upcoming wave of hybrid work, the problems companies might face, and how Webex has been evolved to meet those challenges.
Communications and the cloud have seemingly become synonymous. The pandemic-induced trend toward working from home prompted companies to adopt “as a service,” or UCaaS, solutions for collaboration.
This created a massive wave of deployments, and some industry observers began to believe that the on-premises opportunity, which includes private cloud, will no longer be viable.
The past two years have brought a significant amount of societal change, including the way we work. This shift in lifestyle to one that is largely digital also brought about a surge in cyberattacks, which rose in both frequency and complexity last year, with several threats causing concern among industry experts into 2022.
Communications is moving to the cloud. That should be obvious to everyone at this time. What’s less obvious is that the definition of cloud is changing.
In reality, cloud has been constantly evolving since the early 2000s. The first wave of cloud was akin to a hosted service where cloud providers did a “lift and shift” of a big PBX and moved it into a hosting center. There were only two cloud-like things about these UCaaS and CCaaS providers: their infrastructure on the company premises and customers could shift to a subscription model.