Innovation truly took the stage at today’s Special Technology Innovation Panel at ITEXPO (News - Alert) West 2013. The Q&A session brought together a group of seasoned industry players, including: TMC’s Senior Editor Peter Bernstein and Group Editorial Director Erik Linask; James Brehm, Compass Intelligence; Phil Edholm (News - Alert), PKE Consulting; Carl Ford, CEO of Crossfire; Larry Lisser, Embrase; and moderator Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC.

No time was wasted at this year’s panel when it came to talking about the biggest trends to impact communications in the next few years, as well as how these disruptive trends will change current customer lifecycles. Among the largest trends to impact the state of communications in the near future were cloud, virtualization and mobility, as well as emerging game-changing technologies like WebRTC, HTML5 and the changeover from IPv4 to IPv6.


Image via Shutterstock

Edholm, for example, brought some interesting concepts to the table, including the undeniable proliferation of mobile devices. “We are seeing an absolute explosion in devices…devices are changing in a very fundamental way,” he explained, citing, for example, smart cars and smart televisions. “Your television is what we used to call a supercomputer 15 years ago,” he says. “We’ve gone through four generations of devices in over a decade. Does anyone believe that three or four years from now, that’s not going to experience another change?”

WebRTC was also at the forefront of the panel conversation. “WebRTC is going to do to communications what the browser did to information 20 years ago,” Edholm added. “We are seeing fundamental transformation in information technology.”

The overall message being relayed by the panelists is that businesses need to think about how this will impact the way they deliver service and operate.

When asked how these disrupting trends and technologies will transform existing customer lifecycles, the answer was more than clear: It has to remain focused on the customer and end-user experience.

“The underlying theme with regards to all of these emerging technologies is experience,” Linask explained. “It’s about the end-user and customer experience and how you interact with your end-users and customers…it’s all about how we interact and engage with [customers] and how we allow them to engage with us.”

This includes the influence of Web-based customer service and engagement. “The more we go toward the Web-model, the more experiences will begin happening,” Ford noted. Edholm, for example, explained that up to 90 percent of all customer interactions are preceded by a website, and yet there is no integration between the website and the people who visit them. Clearly, there is room for improvement and growth.

Lisser elaborated that there is also a lag between what companies are now able to build, how their marketing departments get to market and the time that consumers are ready to adopt.

“I encourage everyone to think about their users,” he said. “[Companies need to think] about their customers and what they’re ready to buy more so than what [they] can build. We can surely out build them, but sometimes we don’t stop to think about that; we end up investing in a lot of CAPEX for going to market in a market that’s not ready.”