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Business UC voip

CTO lunches

Headed to London again for my last CTO lunch of the season. Today I have Stephanie Watson, CEO of MZA Associates as my guest speaker.
Steph is a great girl and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Unified Communications market.

For those unaware of the nature of my CTO lunches we have a guest speaker and up to 10 other invited guests, normally director level individuals with responsibility for IT operations, around a table for a highly informed and stimulating lunchtime debate. The format works brilliantly, the key being the fact that everyone in the room knows what they are talking about.

On this occasion with Steph on attendance the topic is clearly the Unified Communications market (the PBX of old).

UC has for some time been a boring, mature market subject to widespread industry consolidation. This however is changing as the likes of Microsoft and Google move in on the space. Although I’m leaving it until the new year to sort there is a strong likelihood that the primary means of voice connectivity to trefor.net will be via google hangout and Skype. During the process of setting up the business I have made extensive use of google hangouts for video conferencing and google docs for collaborative project work such as sketching out the initial functionality requirements of a blog template refresh.

Now I’m sure that the likes of Cisco and Avaya will have something to say about  who are going to be players in the UC space. Cisco has a compelling network integration case and Avaya have a huge installed base. This market is still very much a long game to play but it wouldn’t surprise me to see some real changes in 2014. The combination of Android and the still very much nascent chromebook could well be driving factors.

I doubt that I’ll be summarising the key points of today’s discussion – there are still too many parties between now and Christmas. However expect to see this subject debated extensively on trefor.net in the new year.

Tomorrow is my last day at the Timico desk. My wife briefly laboured under the impression that the new order in 2014 would see an end to, or at least significant reduction in jaunts to London for “networking” events and a corresponding shrinking of the waistline. Whilst the latter is undeniably desirable, the CTO lunches will continue in some guise or another. They are too valuable not to have.
If you are coming along today I look forward to seeing you. If not stay tuned…

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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