The focus on unified communications in the enterprise is drawing consideration and questions from companies both large and small, with efforts to anticipate the market’s direction and possible tech disruptions. At the 2016 Enterprise Connect event, these issues were top of mind.

Joining John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, and Peter Santeusanio, partner and CIO of BCStrategies, spoke to Scott Velting, executive director of enterprise cloud communications at AT&T, fielded the duo’s questions on these topics and more, as well as providing a pre-announcement teaser for a new utility platform soon to be released by his company.

Mobile to workplace

One of the early focuses of the discussion was on meeting the expectations from consumers who have grown accustomed to using the apps of their personal devices, particularly when they take those expectations with them into their workplace.

“Without a doubt, I think mobile devices and the mobility trend in general is really prominent right now … a lot of our customers are looking for how [they can] take advantage of that [to] make their businesses more productive, and we’re trying to enhance our portfolio accordingly,” Velting said. “Customers are used to using that consumer-oriented device.”

The new Collaborate

The conversation soon moved to AT&T’s unreleased but buzz-surrounded new product, AT&T Collaborate, which Velting described as “essentially a cloud, voice and collaboration product.” Giving further details, he said, “It enables things like audio-video web-conferencing, instant messaging and presence, desktop sharing … And so the customer will be able to use it as simply a voice product … but it also enables them with additional capabilities so they can support the needs of their employees and find a way to plug it into their processes to improve their businesses.”

Addressing questions of the target market, Velting stated, “We’re going to be positioning the product pretty much from small to large. I think the sweet spot, initially, is going to be more in the small-to-medium space, but … we’re going to find ways to integrate the product with the rest of our portfolio so we can scale it up — market and meet the needs of some of those more complex customers as well.”

Covering the bases

Moving on to some other concerns, the discussion covered topics on cloud evolution, hybrid environments, maintaining legacy hardware, the Federation bringing products from various companies together, mobility and security.

A big concern, of course, was Big Data: “On the Big Data front, we’re just beginning in terms of the possibilities there, especially when you think about what’s going on with the Internet of Things, device connectivity, that type of thing. That, and the analytics related to it is going to be a critical piece of the business going forward, for the industry in general,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Enterprise Connect 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE