DURHAM – Billed as a night to talk tech and shoot hoops on Duke’s “Coach K Court,” it didn’t disappoint.
Hosted by Opex Technologies, the evening kicked off with heavy hor d’oeuvres, cocktails and 3-point shooting contests, before settling down for two panel discussions on UCaaS and CCaas.
(UCaaS is a cloud delivery model that offers a variety of communication and collaboration applications and services, while CCaaS stands for call center software that is built and hosted in the cloud.)
“It’s a fun time to be in this industry,” Steve Dietz, Fuze’s director of product, told the 200-strong crowd gathered inside Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham on Thursday night. “We are in a major time of change in the technology stack across corporations.”
The Boston-based Fuze is a provider of cloud-based UCaas.
Maurie Munro, VP of UC Solutions at Masergy; Steve Dietz, Director of Product at Fuze; Clarke Russell, Director of Operations, Custom Engineering at RingCentral; Bryan R. Martin Chairman of the Board and CTO at 8×8 Inc.
Shooting hoops in Cameron Stadium at Opex event on Thursday night.
Dietz said there are two major changes in the workforce impacting what kinds of technologies they provide. Among them is the way IT is now regarded in the business setting.
“Even as recently as 10 years ago, I think IT was really regarded as a back-office function,” he said. “It is now seen as an enabler. It’s really a key part of the success of a lot of the businesses we talk about.”
The second trend, he observed, is the changing nature of work: where people want to work, how they want to work.
“That puts again interesting challenges on the IT leaders to say, my workforce might not want to come to an office every day. What does that mean for the tools that I provide my employees to get their work done?”
