April 29, 2019: 9:30 pm EST – expect the live blogging to begin tomorrow.
Here is the schedule:
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8:30 AM – 8:40 AMFritz Hobbs, CEO, Ribbon – Welcome
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8:40 AM – 9:20 AMKevin Riley, CTO & EVP, Ribbon – Enabling Digital Services Transformation
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9:20 AM – 9:35 AMJohn St. Amand, EVP Analytics Business Strategy – Actionable Analytics
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9:35 AM – 9:50 AMShawn Sims, President & CEO, NuWave Communications
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9:50 AM – 10:00 AMGeoff Moore, Director Voice Services, Infrastructure & Transformation, Bell
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10:30 AM – 10:50 AMJohn B. Coyle, JSP DISA, Voice Operations – Digital Transformation in the Government
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10:50 AM – 11:05 AMFrank Shaffer, Head of Global Inbound, BT
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11:05 AM – 12:00 PMSacha Gera, SVP – Innovation in Cloud Communications + Panel
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12:00 PM – 2:00 PMLUNCH Combined with Solutions Showcase
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2:00 PM – 2:20 PMHaley Katsman, VP Account Development, Highspot – Keynote “Revenue Reinvented”
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2:20 PM – 2:40 PMEric Burger, CTO FCC – Nuisance Calling
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2:40 PM – 3:15 PMUCaaS/Enterprise Edge Survey Insights + Charter, IBM, Hertz – Fireside Chat
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3:15 PM – 3:35 PMAndre Reid, Sr. Director Product Management, Poly
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4:00 PM – 4:40 PM“Looking Ahead” Panel with Leading Industry Analysts
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4:40 PM – 5:00 PMGreg Flick, Director of Key Accounts, Yealink
- 5:00 PM – 5:10 PM
- Bita Milanian, SVP Marketing
8:40 am:
Fritz Hobbs, CEO, Ribbon – Welcome
Lots happening . Edgewater acquisition. #1 in SBC. Now in analytics with Anova purchase.
8:44 am:
Kevin Riley, CTO & EVP, Ribbon – Enabling Digital Services Transformation
We will expand strategy, also new bets.
Four areas of focus
- SaaS and IP transformation
- Enterprise Edge
- App Insight and assurance
- Security
We are not abandoning the core – we are a bigger company now and expanding our strike zone.
Services become impossible to manage manually, big data, ML and analytics must surround our toolchains.
Lots of great stuff happening thanks to recent acquisitions. #1 in SBC thanks to Edgewater.
These acquisitions bring us into data domain.
Analytics and Security big areas for us. As is Kandy – our white label platform for partners in UCaS and CPaas. We bolt CPaas on. We don’t need to rip out call control to do this. This is what AT&T has done with us and we are going to scale to the moon with them.
Containers are next.
We will now add Ribbon DNA into Edgewater solutions. EdgeMark is a fully integrated edge device – allows an enterprise to access carrier services.
SBCs now use GPU – far more efficient.
Lots of growth here – better economics. The upfront CAPEX is half and power efficiencies are 800% better according to one tier-one prospect who is evaluating this.
Big Data Analytics helps us break through ops barrier of standardizing on new more – unlock value – drive cost out of network.
“Operations, Security and Monetization – becomes Ribbon Analytics”
User device and behaviour mapping allows you to flag anomalous behaviour.
Learning platform gives you tips on what it thinks you should do – performance based machine learning.
Our competitors vary in carrier versus enterprise – we are the only company optimizing offer for core, edge and premise.
This puts us in unique position – building the next-gen cloud-centric stack.
From core to edge to premise.
We have bets in all the next-gen areas.
9:27 am
John St. Amand, EVP Analytics Business Strategy – Actionable Analytics
Storage costs plummeting.
Network decisions are being made in real-time thanks to analytics.
Knowing what phones are doing at all times- monitoring the network – seeing what the issues are and ensuring proper QoE for subscribers. Finding rogue devices crushing the network – etc. We can’t design for peak hour – we need an intelligent network with analytics.
Carriers are building in analytics and advertising into their networks to help pay for the cost of unlimited plans which take 15 Gb per month of usage.
We have 32 patents in this space.
9:50 am
Shawn Sims, President & CEO, NuWave Communications
Founded in 1998 – after 1996 telecom dereg act.
We went after tier 2-4 markets instead of tier 1 NFL cities like other CLECs.
We have a low churn rate.
“If you can be a market leader and price leader you will hit the financial victory we all yearn for.”
Ribbon – seems to make genius acquisitions over and over.
Ribbon allows us to give a customer a relationship they aren’t used to.
We wouldn’t be where we are without them.
10:03 am:
Geoff Moore, Director Voice Services, Infrastructure & Transformation, Bell
Lots of investment – we cover 91% of Canada with LTE-A services. We own the best TV network and the largest and most important sports institutions.
We are bringing in techs from legacy telecom to cut code.
Challenges being solved:
- Automated network surveillance
- Automated network recovery
- Automated network traffic controller
- Automated end to end change deployments
- DMS workflow automation
They can slowly throttle new services to customers and roll back as needed. This has improved change success.
First DMS went into network 40 years ago – we partnered with Ribbon to put it in and take it out. Used to be Nortel/Northern Telecom.
We have strong collaboration between our teams and Ribbon.
10:42 am:
John B. Coyle, JSP DISA, Voice Operations – Digital Transformation in the Government
Lots of impediments in Federal Government.
Lot’s of discussion about making things in the government more open, interoperable and cost-effective.
Consumers don’t use a FiOS-only phone but that is how the Federal Government works.
This causes the government to follow, not lead – a very dangerous place for us to be.
Check out the Why Can’t We List
Great discussion of how the migration is taking place. Bulk robocall issues – like a 20th century DoS attack.
Next-gen SBCs are the answer.
Our attack surface increases and so does our risk.
Need to be able to migrate in stages – need backward compatibility.
Hundreds of our IP phones have worked on 3-4 PBXs – a first for the government.
Very aspirational ending – basically – we can get the government to get tomorrow’s phone service, today.
11:00 am
Frank Shaffer, Head of Global Inbound, BT Global Services
Discussion of network topology they can make a SIP connection look like TDM in the IN network layer.
This allows customers to have seamless connectivity between legacy and IP offices/contact centers.
14 countries have announced the end of TDM – a forced transition.
Recording devices no longer have to be at the local site – SIPREC allows the call to be recorded without interference in the cloud.
Ribbon partnership has allowed this to happen.
11:10 am
Sacha Gera, SVP – Innovation in Cloud Communications
Unstructured creativity or innovation allowed athletes to become superstars without being the biggest or strongest. Pele transformed how soccer was played.
Kandy helps customers to be ready for the future – white label – UCaaS or CPaaS.
Discussion of AT&T working with Kandy – I covered the news here.
You can buy turnkey apps – ecommerce-centric.
Omnichannel bot-enabled contact center takes 15 minutes to set up.
No app to install.
They are looking for more partners.
Programmable telecoms is coming – pay attention before somebody else does.
11:31 am
Panel
Greg Johnson AT&T
Sergei Gerashchenko Etisalat
Rob Kurver APIdays Conferences
OTT is a bigger factor in consumer than enterprise – they provide focus on CX which is good because we have a reference or benchmark.
Carriers are not too late to the API game – they have lots of value to offer.