My first VoiceCon in 2010 was so much fun (oh yeah, I also learned a lot and made quite a few new acquaintances) that I knew I had to plan for Enterprise Connect 2011. It was also my first live on-site coverage for insideCTI (I’d just started the blog a month earlier), so I really didn’t know what to expect. In 2010 my family tagged along for the 8-hour road trip to Orlando to provide moral support (in the form of “We get to visit Mickey!”) and endured a few days of hotel stay with me, away from the comfort of our TV, sofas, and beds. I would go to the conference during the day, return to the hotel for a “home” cooked supper, then start organizing my notes in order to start burning the midnight oil on the blog. Thankfully the hotel WiFi offered decent speeds.

This year I flied solo, road trip and all. Driving myself for eight hours down Interstate 75 was rough — the various segments of road work made it worse — and again I was reminded that I’m not in college anymore. Still, I think eight hours was about the threshold before I’d gladly subject myself to TSA groping. Had the conference been held in Miami then the TSA would’ve had me by my… Well, you get the idea.

The Gaylord Palms Resort (commonly known as the “biodome” to returning conference goers) hadn’t changed much: the same lush plants, the humidity, the bored alligators, and lots of Avaya banners. Yep, no doubt I had arrived at the right conference when I walked in early Monday morning to pick up my media badge.

Before the trip I’d thought that Skype would be the most talked about exhibitor (and David Gurle, VP Skype Enterprise, also a featured keynote speaker). After all, everybody Skypes these days. And that’s both at home and in the office, both audio and video. Skype’s intention of moving into the enterprise market is also well known now. Some may even say that Skype’s one of the first unified communication applications.

But frankly Skype Enterprise didn’t have anything spectacular for this conference. A partnership with Citrix GoToMeeting, a pitch of 24/7 support tied to SLAs, and a closer relationship with Avaya (a sibling company also sharing Silver Lake Partners as an investor). Disappointedly, nothing too exciting, especially when details were hard to come by too. Was it being overly conservative and cautious because of the planned IPO this year?

The debut of the Innovation Showcase was awesome. Not only did I get to learn about new companies (ProtonMedia, Radish Systems, harmon.ie), but Fonolo was one of the winners and I got to catch up with CEO Shai Berger. I hope the showcase becomes a regular part of Enterprise Connect (and winning companies granted better booth locales).

Speaking of innovation, I was introduced to Hookflash CEO Trent Johnsen whose company came in second in the recent StartupCamp 3 in Miami. Always a pleasure to meet a tech entrepreneur outside of Silicon Valley (he’s from Calgary, Canada).

The always professionally dressed and equally professionally equipped Dan York, Director of Communications at Voxeo, was kind enough to meet with me to chat about his company and the conference in general. Too bad he didn’t divulge any juicy news about possible acquisitions, but he did touch upon some things such as Voxeo’s new office, growth in its Beijing office, and a new data center in Asia. He also wondered why Google or Apple — two companies representing Android and iOS, respectively — weren’t represented at any of the sessions discussing UC mobility. I shared that same sentiment. I eagerly await the year when either of those companies shows up at Enterprise Connect…

Data networking giant Cisco proved it’s not just a one trick pony with SocialMiner winning Best of Enterprise Connect 2011. This social customer care solution monitors social media networks and lets a company effectively respond to customers. (Side note: Avaya also has a similar product called the Social Media Manager, and compared to SocialMiner the UX was night and day.)

The highlight of the trip was probably the invitation-only media dinner hosted by Verizon on Monday, at a steakhouse inside the biodome. The dinner was great (had the buffalo steak and bread pudding for dessert), but even better was the opportunity to chat with folks from Verizon and Cisco, not just about UCCaaS but really having regular conversations at the dinner table. Alas, it’s good to know that marketing people are humans too and not androids programmed to divulge only corporate press releases.

Was there a low point? Unfortunately, yes. If anyone found a VirginMobile MiFi hotspot, please return it to me. It’s a blogger’s best friend and I’d lost it sometime on Tuesday, March 1.

But overall, I had a blast this year. Although I didn’t do much liveblogging (I do love liveblogging though) this time, my tweet stream was fairly consistent during the events I attended. And kudos to the good WiFi coverage at the venue this year, most of the time my iPhone 4 was able to last till the end of the day even with heavy tweeting. In fact, lots of people participated in #enterprisecon (I hope Dan’s thumbs are okay) and it made the conference even better!

Enterprise Connect 2012 is March 26-29 at the same biodome. What will next year’s hot topics be? (Please, not interoperability…)

The first workshop on I attended on Monday was “The Social Web: Just Another Chennel?” presented by Bob Furniss (@bobfurniss) and Faith Legendre (@faithlengendre) joined via WebEx. It was one of the many social media focused sessions here at ACCE this week. How to deal with this new interaction channel is very much on the minds of attendees here, many of whom are in a supervisory or management role in their contact centers.

It was a mixed crowd in terms of social media adoption. I sensed a lot of uncertainty and maybe even confusion among the late- and non-adopters. They seemed overly cautious to the impact of opening the social media floodgates. Do I dedicate resources to monitor blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.? What are some social media tools to use? What about the safety of agents (i.e. hostile customers)? What if employees trash the company via social media? How does social media benefit an inbound call center?

Here are my takeaways…

Ignoring SM is not the answer

Social media is here and it’s here to stay. Ignoring it doesn’t solve anything. There are people talking about your brand and your company whether you like it or not. It used to be over the phone with friends and family. Now it’s over Facebook and Twitter, and the audience is 100 times larger.

It’s better to learn about it and decide for yourself whether the time is right for your organization to take any initiative. It’s also better to engage than to ignore, even if yo do not have all the answers. In other words, you want to seize control of the conversation rather than see it spiral out of control by others.

Implement a clear policy

Almost all companies have an official policy on IT asset usage: keep your laptop locked when not in use, do not stop the virus scanner software, do not surf questionable Web sites, etc. It would be wise to construct a clear policy on social media usage as well. If your company decides not to adopt social media, then by all means specify it in an official policy memo or an employee manual.

Training and certification

Not all of your agents may have the personality or qualification to handle social media interactions. Faith really impressed me when she said that Cisco has an initiative to train and certify all of its employees in social media. Cisco obviously takes this very seriously and in turn employees will understand their responsibility with regards to social media engagements.

Think long-term rather than immediate ROI

Just as bad reviews can greatly damage a brand through the propagation of social media, a good review can also exponentially improve a brand. So don’t expect a person to make more purchases in the near future simply because you were proactively engaged in helping him or her with a decision. Instead, think about the good vibe that you’ve “banked” with this customer. This customer is more likely to return as well as recommend your brand to his or her circle of friends and family. But all that will take time, sometimes a long time, to see the positive effects on the bottom line.

Yesterday Genesys (owned by Alcatel-Lucent) held an analyst conference to present the latest and greatest about all things this #1 CTI software vendor has to offer. Thankfully, plenty of #staranalysts (seriously?) members were generous in tweeting the information onto the #GenesysAR stream to share with everyone. Yours truly, being a simple amateur n00b blogger, didn’t get to attend this fabulous event at the serene Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park, CA. But who needs physical presence when virtual is the trend and telepresence is chic, right? Yet having been to a Genesys G-Force conference where attendees are constantly being fed in a luxurious venue, I sure miss this:

Well, I suppose there is always G-Force Chicago in April… At any rate, what’s an analyst conference without shout-outs, right? Is it like the MTV Music Awards show without the lame jokes, outrageous stunts, and questionable attire…?

All right, onto business. First, CEO and President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Software Group, Paul Segre, took the stage to ease concerns about the recent restructuring and reorganization. It’s all about leading:

While that may hold true, the last time I checked Wall Street Journal, companies restructure and reorganize to cut costs which often translates to reducing headcount. When I spoke to a couple of laid off Genesys employees last year, none of them mentioned anything about the leading part. Either management did not convey this top-down, or maybe it was just a reaction to the global economic meltdown? There’s really no shame in admitting that — everybody’s hurting these days. But luckily for my ex-Genesys friends, they have since found jobs with competitors. (Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Whoever gets laid off in telecom, stays in telecom. It’s true.)

Alcatel-Lucent is in the global telecom equipment business. In terms of its $8 billion market cap, it is dwarfed compared to its well-known competitors: Nokia ($52 billion), Motorola ($15 billion), Siemens ($79 billion), Cisco ($130 billion), and Ericsson ($32 billion). However, it did strike gold with the Genesys acquisition. It bought the #1 contact center software company with an established worldwide customer base, and leaves all the aforementioned competitors in the dust when comparing contact center sales. The strategy then, of course, is to tie ALU hardware sales to Genesys software:

It’s a no-brainer. Oh, I remember fondly of the (supposedly) first U.S. integration between an Alcatel-Lucent PBX and Genesys CTI. It was somewhere in sunny, humid south Florida during summer, and I was working with a senior Genesys consultant. At the time Genesys was already part of ALU, but amazingly the PBX shipped with an E1 telephony interface card so my poor PM had to authorize the purchase of a T1 adapter. To further our amusement, the PBX came with French manuals and the console was dotted with nothing but French. We all wished then we had paid more attention in high school French class…

But I digress. In order to align the sales resources between the parent and child companies, ALU had to obtain more control of Genesys. Not to say that Genesys was a runaway company, but it was the best and logical business decision. And when former President and CEO Wes Hayden left for Nuance (and now President of LiveOps), CTO Paul Segre was a good fit to lead Genesys because of his past history with Alcatel (VP and GM of Wireline Access business unit).

Much has improved in the ALU-Genesys technology integration. Just recently I was on such a project and it was a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t like fitting a square peg into a round hole anymore. Even the PBX technician swore by the ALU switch, “I enjoy working on it more than the Avaya,” he’d told me. That spoke volumes especially coming from a seasoned PBX tech. Definitely kudos to the ALU and Genesys engineers.

So what else does Genesys have in store for CTI fanatics? The elusive Genesys 8 makes an (updated?) appearance (hmmm, didn’t I see it last year at G-Force Orlando?):

Quite a combo meal indeed. What does this mean for implementations? Will the team have to deal with three different vendors? It’s already a major task just to get to Genesys Tech Support (upgrade, send logs, we’ll call you back), I’d hate to be on the field putting in Genesys 8 and having to work with engineers from Lithium and InQuira also. Even if it’s cool that tweets can get routed in G8. (Really nothing major considering emails and faxes can get routed already.)

Of course, the obligatory but nonetheless intriguing Apple iPad reference, note that Apple is a Genesys customer:

Sigh. Apple’s coolness factor has just gone down a notch. We all know the iPad isn’t for serious business — games, games, games!!! Okay, and ebooks! And by ebooks I mean comics! (Dilbert would look great on a contact center iPad.)

As I had posted before, Genesys is ready to pounce on Nortel customers. Nortel customers can probably negotiate a good deal now. Yet not sure how else to put in an ALU switch without rip and replace? ALU would want to sell the hardware.

Later there was an NDA segment which barred those in attendance to disclose juicy information. Wonder what it is? I’m thinking an embedded chip which can be injected under you skin that contains all your preferred IVR menu option trees. So whenever you pick up a phone to dial an IVR, just put the speaker near the chip (don’t embed it near your eye ’cause then you’d look like an idiot) and it will automagically navigate through the system to get you to an agent. In other words, the chip emits a DTFM tone of zero. #rumor #secretproduct

There’s a lot more information from these top industry analysts. Again, to follow the complete Twitter conversation, search for #GenesysAR. If you love to hate or hate to love Genesys, then you owe it to yourself.