One of the great pleasures of covering the broad landscape of Information and Communications (ICT) is going to industry events and having the opportunity to listen to and interact with some of the best and brightest minds. In fact, if trying to be objective, one of the best places to do so is ITEXPO East where in the past few days here in sunny and warm Miami Beach, I have enjoyed listening to those great minds and kicking the tires of the latest innovations in a host of areas.

For decades, the telecom industry changed very little. Telephone communications were the only channel available to customers, which made running a business and providing customer service relative easy for operators. In recent years, however, that dynamic has been turned on its ear. As customer expectations for multichannel customer service have grown, operators are faced with a new set of challenges.

Though the IoT and wearable technology industries have been well-debated at ITEXPO this week, one other topic has taken front and center as well: security.

For the past several years, technology market research firms and analysts have been predicting that machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions and the Internet of Things (IoT) were poised to truly explode on a global scale. Some of those predictions may have been premature, but it appears that they are finally beginning to come to fruition now.

Perhaps the most widely discussed technology today is voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). Using the Internet to make phone calls allows businesses to slash telecom costs and collaborate more easily; as such, the technology has been widely adopted over the past several years.

Diane Salvatora Vice President, Global Circuit Sales at Unify, threw the audience a little curveball near the start of her keynote presentation, "Millennials, BYOD, and the Rise of the Anywhere Worker: Turning Challenges Into Opportunities for Today's Dynamic Workplace" on Thursday morning at ITEXPO Miami.

2014 will forever be known as "the year of the hack." And while many of the highest-profile intrusions were point-of-sale attacks on retailers or email hacks of corporations, VoIP and SIP security remain a major concern for organizations across the globe.

The world is currently amidst one of history's greatest technological shifts driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), according to Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett-Packard (HP) Shane Wall. Wall took to the stage this morning to deliver a keynote on the ever-advancing world of 3D printing and IoT during ITEXPO 2015-taking place now through January 30 in Miami, Florida.

This morning's keynote speech delivered by Mite President and CEO Rich McBee was truly riveting and entertaining. An unparalleled industry leader-Mitel's revenue more than doubled under his leadership-McBee imparted invaluable insights, best practices and advice to this morning's audience regarding cloud and hosted unified communications as a service (UCaaS).

If you thought holding a M2M, IoT standards-driven breakout session at 9 am the last day of the M2M Evolution Conference & Expo was a risky move, think again. Conversely, there was standing room only this morning at the "One M2M, IIC and the Quest to be Different Standards" breakout as trade show participants convened to hear the challenges and opportunities surrounding M2M and IoT standards.

"Wearables are penetrating into the enterprise and they will only grow from there," Beau Wilder, Director of Strategic Solutions for Plantronics, said during a breakout presentation today at ITEXPO titled "How Wearable Tech Will Change the Enterprise."

We've been discussing net neutrality for many years. Recently, the debate over this controversial topic has begun heating up again.

With all the high profile network breaches in recent months of everyone from CENTCOM to Sony and Target, we are all by now aware of the potential for hackers to gain unauthorized access to our networks and our data. Yet most of us don't bother to take the simple step of PIN protecting our smartphones.

Communications service providers are missing out on a marvelous opportunity to make recurring revenues from DID numbers, says Rehan Allahwala of DIDx and Super Technologies Inc. DID Exchange, a service of Super Technologies, is a VoIP-based wholesale DID phone number marketplace for telecommunications service providers of all stripes.