The technology industry encompasses different innovations and capabilities that transform businesses and the way people communicate every day. Products and solutions are frequently updated with the latest functionality and features due to the constant changes and improvements.

TMC (News - Alert) recently caught up with Phil Edholm, president and principal at PKE Consulting LLC, a provider of strategic consulting for computing, networking and communications, about the latest and greatest in the technology and communications space, and how they will impact both consumers and enterprises alike in the upcoming years.

One of the hottest industry areas right now is wearable technology. The recently held Wearable Tech Expo highlighted a number of innovations that already exist on both the enterprise and consumer side. It also brought to light a number of challenges and questions to ponder as products become sleeker in design and more functional.  

“Wearable technology has both general and vertically specific applications,” Edholm said. “In the general space, capabilities such as location can be used in innovative ways, while verticals such as health care and field service will have significant potentials.”

Another hot topic is WebRTC, real-time communications over a Web browser. The emergence of WebRTC has generated a host of new vendors looking to change the communications world. 

“Two factors are changing: first, basic voice and video conferencing are rapidly moving to be essentially ‘free’, with added costs and values defining premium offers. The second is the capability of WebRTC to disrupt the current communications model where telephony sessions are generally negotiated server to server (SP-SP),” Edholm explained. “In WebRTC, there will be a large number of Web server communications hosts, with users generally going directly in their end device without a server on their side. This change will dramatically change both the landscape and the value mapping of providers, as well as enterprise vendors.”

Video capabilities like WebRTC are impacting business communications. Edholm explained what the potential is for video as a mainstream business technology.

“Video is an excellent media for solving the issue of remote communications related to feedback in interactions,” he said. “This is critical for the percentage of communications where the parties need to have visual feedback, pejoratively called selling collaboration (as differentiated from Task Collaboration where feedback is not essential). With video, these meetings can be much more productive and avoid common pitfalls of misunderstanding. The second that comes is the need to assure that video is useful. This requires interoperability, good quality and users who know how to use video.”

“Over the next five years WebRTC is going to have a transformational impact as communications moves to a Web-type model, with thousands to millions of Web hosts that are capable of managing communications sessions using WebRTC. The impact of this will be transformational business models, incredible new applications, as well as huge economic and social/political impact,” Edholm added.

Other technologies that are making a big impact to service providers and enterprises are network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN).

 “NFV, especially when combined with the control/packet plane abstraction of SDN, will open the door to both new players and commodity component players to market to the service provider community,” said Edholm. “The movement to both standard processing and virtualization combined with the inexorable forward progress of Moore's Law is reducing the need for specialized hardware. This is especially true as more and more of communications moves to IP, reducing the need for specialized telecom (read T1, etc.) hardware to get media flows into processors. The result is that more and more the communications solutions are predominately software running on a combination of standard servers/VMs, networks, and general purpose end points (PCs, tablets, and smartphones).”

One thing that can’t be missed in the tech world is the number of smartphones and tablets circulating among employees today. As these mobile devices continue to make their way into almost every part of our lives – from navigating via GPS and managing documents to SMS messaging and sharing on social media, e-mail and the Web – it’s easy to see which operating systems dominate the market. We’ve heard a lot of back and forth about the battle between Apple (News - Alert) and Samsung, but what about BlackBerry, Windows and Nokia smartphones?

“We need to be very cognizant that the mobile market has been one of waves,” Edholm said. “Over the last 12 years we have gone from Palm to BlackBerry to iPhone to now Android (News - Alert). It is reasonable to assume that this trend will continue, for example, the Mozilla WebOS device software that enables lower price point devices. So the competition today is actually Apple and Android, with Samsung (News - Alert) as the largest Android vendor. In the end, devices are becoming very smart displays with real-time (WebRTC) and smart caching. With networks having both very high availability and bandwidth, the need for having a computer is of less and less value. For example, look at the apps on your device and how many have value if you are NOT connected to a network. It is quickly apparent that the majority require the network and are primarily a display of data from a server or cloud somewhere. Using HTML5 and WebRTC to simplify both devices and apps will change the landscape.”

If you’re looking for one place that covers all of these topics, it’s your lucky day. ITEXPO is a communications and technology event that happens twice a year to bring together industry executives, developers and technicians to network, educate, exhibit and discuss the latest developments in the industry. It covers everything from the cloud and Internet-enabled communications to machine to machine (M2M) technology, enterprise communications and security in panel sessions, keynote presentations, show floor exhibitions, workshops and networking events.

“Obviously WebRTC is a critical component of the communications discussion, but I also am looking forward to more related topics like BYOD, cloud and virtualization. I find that ITEXPO (News - Alert) has a broad coverage and seeing the components in a single place gives me a comprehensive update on the progress across the industry,” Edholm said.