An introduction to the common architectures and technologies used to power cloud communications offerings

An overview and comparison of the top telephony APIs and development platforms

What business models, ecosystems and sales channels are working in the real world.

An overview of the most common mistakes and pitfalls in integrating communications technologies such as IVRs and text messaging and how to avoid them

A series of talks from authors of the second edition of the authoritative text on where Cloud Communications is going and why.

Buy or build? That’s been the burning question for businesses for hears when faced with the decision whether to outsource or not. Initially, one might have thought that question in the cloud, with the launch of Amazon’s EC2 and other public clouds. Naturally, businesses demanding more control over their cloud environments found a way to leverage the cloud model without sacrificing that command, and the private cloud was born and, with it, the debate over which is more appropriate for your organization. We’re all in agreement that all clouds aren’t the same. Join this session to ot only understand the differences between public and private and which is best for you.

There are few technologies that have created such as much confusion as “the cloud.” What is it? What is it not? There are as many answers as there are potential cloud users. But, like other technologies that have commanded this much attention, cloud computing has a business value, which is driving interest in this new technology model. This session will discuss why the cloud has created such a commotion, and why it offers a business model that will influence communications providers and users for the foreseeable future.

Just as it has with previous emerging technologies, the SMB market presents a tremendous opportunity to cloud services providers. But, just as with other communications solutions, SMBs have specific priorities in mind when deciding what to put on the cloud. This session will discuss trends around SMB cloud computing adoption, including who is adopting the cloud, for what services, and what’s driving their decisions.

Drawing on the results of a ground breaking survey of the cloud computing landscape, this session will discuss what cloud computing user would like to see in the evolution of the space, who they consider to be the leaders in the market, and perceptions of the role of mobile computing in the environment. Perspectives on the evolution of remote access will be covered along with an assessment of adoption rates, likely futures, and key milestones in the process. Session participants will get a current assessment of the market, what users would like to see as next steps, how they will deploy cloud computing, and likely growth rates for the cloud.

Cloudbased solutions are dramatically reshaping the traditional telecom industry, providing voice and communications solutions that meet today’s mobile and distributed work model at a fraction of the cost of legacy phone systems. The once tried and true PBX and traditional hosted PBX models are being put to the test, as cloud services are quickly becoming mainstream and giving traditional carriers a serious run for their money.

In fact, Gartner recently reported that “the cloudbased services market will be worth $150 billion by 2013, with telecommunications carriers unlikely to grab more than about 5 percent unless they acquire existing cloud service providers.” In addition, the rising popularity of new and innovative smartphones is playing a critical role in the changing face of telecom, serving as a driving force behind the evolution to mobile cloud computing.

Will the $7 billion PBX market become obsolete? How can carriers jump on board? What does the future hold for traditional hosted services and VoIP? Will cloudbased telecom continue to gain rapid momentum not only for small businesses, but for the enterprise? How can the enterprise community move past its hesitations to adopt cloud computing models?

This session will address these questions and more, providing an indepth perspective of the role of telecom carriers in the new age of communications.

Social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others are increasingly being used alongside traditional methods for driving traffic to websites storefronts. Done right, this can result in a significant traffic spike. For example, Denny’s Super Bowl promotion resulted in not only an unprecedented uptick in site traffic, but a top 10 Twitter topic for by the end of the game and during the promotion. Links from other highly popular sites, referred to as slashdotting, can also drive massive amounts of traffic to smaller sites. This is all well and good, as long as the site doesn’t crash from the surge. This session will discuss how and why the cloud is the ideal mechanism for supporting your social media activities and handling these traffic spikes.

Cloud services are popping up everywhere and range from utility computing to platformasa service to cloudbased end user applications. Generally, clouds provide scalable resources and data storage, both very important for collaboration applications. However, a lot of the heavy lifting in collaboration is still done by digital signaling processors and specialty hardware. Do clouds have what it takes to deliver highquality collaboration experience, most importantly voice and video, which is available today through onpremises systems?

Collaboration applications require thick bandwidth pipes connecting clients and servers; therefore, moving collaboration servers into the Cloud requires a lot of bandwidth to and from the cloud. Unfortunately, current Cloud services put fairly low limit on bit rate to and from the cloud and charge a lot per incoming and outgoing gigabyte. Will advances in Cloud technology allow for relaxing these limits and creating a different billing model applicable to cloudbased collaboration? The session will gather opinion leaders in the field of collaboration and cloud computing to discuss the challenges and provide some answers.

Many people believe you can take traditional identity and security practices, throw them in a cloud environment, and expect everything to work just fine. That’s a misconception. The truth is, businesses need to be concerned about cloud security – but they needn’t be paralyzed by it.

Businesses taking advantage of cloud computing should utilize cloud security approaches that support sharing of roles, policies, and workflows, rather than merely providing single signon. In fact, the heightened concern we’re seeing has actually become a spur to action and has begun to drive cloud security to a whole new level. This session will focus on the key areas where a successful migration to cloud computing has the potential to actually improve security and reduce risk, and address some of the major issues to account for before and during that migration.

Most businesses today are faced with the challenges of reduced budgets, yet a demand for increased business applications and services. As such, many are turning to the cloud to gain its cost efficiencies and speed of deployment. But, like any technology migration, moving to the cloud requires careful planning and consideration. This session will call on realworld deployment scenarios to consider how enterprises have successfully decided on and deployed cloud services offering reliability and security without sacrificing visibility.

The growth of technologies like cloud computing and virtualization afford service providers a range of opportunities for increasing revenues in their enterprise markets as well as for moving up the value chain in terms of the quality and complexity of services they can provide to businesses. Service provider public cloud revenues are estimated to reach $35 billion by 2013, including $15.5 billion alone from Software as a Service SaaS benefits.

Businesses, however, face barriers to broad adoption of cloud communications services, including security, control, compliance, and quality/SLA. While cloud is definitely on the enterprise agenda, varying strategies and phases of decision making exist, including the decision whether to develop an internal, private cloud or partner with service providers in leveraging the public cloud.

This presentation will describe how service providers can work with enterprise customers to gain the advantages of the cloud by, first, using the public cloud to establish a trusted endtoend cloud service infrastructure, centering on the core concepts of security, control, service level management, and compliance. Attendees will learn how service providers can help effectively implement virtualization and SaaS strategies and understand the key distinctions between the various options available today.

Cloud communications has been embraced by hardware and software companies alike, with hosted VoIP becoming mainstream and presenting a major challenger to the CPE approach to enterprise telephony.

We have seen what Google has done for the search paradigm because of its cloud technology. We are seeing the effect on application development when they are hosted like Salesforce.coms CRM. And there is now clear evidence that cloud computing will do the same for VoIP and the associated communications applications. The key will be establishing key technologies that may be disruptive but take telecom to a whole new level of integration, interoperability and unification.

This session will discuss the future of VoIP, the impact Cloud Computing will have on communications, and how service providers and network operators should prepare themselves.