WebRTC Conference at Enterprise Connect 2013

I have the opportunity to co-chair the WebRTC conference-within-a-conference that will be held in conjunction with Enterprise Connect 2013. This is a top notch mini-conference with four goals in mind:

1. Educate – there will be two tutorial sessions, one by Cisco distinguished engineer, Cullen Jennings, and the other by Google senior product manager, Jan Linden. In this session, attendees will learn the ins and outs of WebRTC and how the standards that make up WebRTC are progressing.
2. Dispel Hype – there is a lot of noise right now about WebRTC, but like my industry colleague, Phil Edholm, said, “we do need some adult thinking here”. To that end, we will have presentations by companies who are either enabling WebRTC for others or who are developing applications using WebRTC themselves. These include Avaya, Microsoft, Thrupoint, and Acme Packet. One additional highlight of this session will be that attendees will be able to hear from Microsoft itself, rather than an industry pundit, about some of the issues it sees with the WebRTC standard as currently proposed. Microsoft will also show a demo illustrating some of the issues and how they could be overcome.
3. Understand Opportunities and Challenges – we will have five “new comers” display their WebRTC products in a sort of “speed dating” format in which they have 9 minutes in which to convince us that they have a compelling offering and that we should follow up with them after the event. These companies include Plivo, Twilio, Plantronics, Addlive, and TenHands. In addition, we have a panel session featuring five major video communications companies – Vidtel, Avaya/Radvision, Cisco, Vidyo, and Polycom. In this session these companies will articulate the view from the top as to why WebRTC will or will not shake up the video communications industry. Finally, our last session will be on how WebRTC may impact and influence customer engagement. We have the privilege of listening to a financial services firm, Vanguard, who is already developing one or more applications using WebRTC. In addition, we will hear from contact center providers  Genesys and Siemens to get their views on how WebRTC may impact how end user companies think about engagement and what channels, including the voice, video and collaboration channels that WebRTC enables, these end users should put in their contact centers and website interfaces. 
4. Networking – this event will be a who’s who of attendees in the WebRTC world. All will be highly accessible during the daylong event and the WebRTC reception that follows it.