Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) today announced that its INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO East 2007, taking place next month in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, will contain a series of educational sessions designed to help businesses maintain business continuity when natural disasters, or other disruptive forces, strike their area.

The conference will be held January 23-26, 2007 at the Ft. Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

According to TMC President and ITEXPO Conference Chairman, Rich Tehrani, while the threat of disruption from hurricanes, and other natural disasters, is a major consideration for businesses in Florida and other Gulf states, businesses worldwide must be prepared for unforeseen events, including pandemics, that can potentially cripple their respective operations.

“Hurricane Katrina last year, and the September 11th terrorist attacks before that, have heightened awareness as to the threat of long-term business disruption. When disaster hits, quick restoration of effective communications systems can help a company save their essential sales and customer service functions from collapsing, while protecting their critical revenue streams,” explained Tehrani.

“In addition, in response to potential disasters, many organizations have assembled teams of ‘Teleworkers’, or home-based employees. As this type of workforce is distributed across the country – and the world – disruption in one geographic region will potentially have less of a negative impact on the organization as a whole. The Telework Coalition conference tracks at ITEXPO will educate enterprises – particularly contact centers – on how to build and manage an effective Telework Force,” added Tehrani.

Sessions and workshops helping companies seamlessly maintain their operations during major disruptions include:
VoIP Options: Disaster Preparedness - Are You Ready?

Wednesday, January 24
Hurricanes. Tornados. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Snowstorms. Vandalism. An errant backhoe. A fire in a neighboring business. Business disruptions caused by these events can be very problematic when it comes to getting a business back up and running. This special panel discussion will focus on what you, as an owner or operations manager of an enterprise, need to know in order to prepare for the inevitable service disruption due to forces beyond your control, and what you need to do to keep your lights on, keep your phones operational, and keep your business connected. Experts will answer questions from the audience, helping you learn what you need to know to effectively prepare for the day disaster strikes.
Disaster Preparedness Workshop

Thursday, January 25
The Disaster Preparedness Workshop is designed to help businesses create a safe, solid, and relatively easy-to-implement solution to ensure continuity of business in the case of a disaster of any size. Co-sponsored by the Enterprise Communications Association, this workshop will focus on the use of converged IP Solutions to seamlessly transfer vital functions and back up critical data, preventing loss and minimizing downtime during a business interruption of any nature.

Telework Coalition Workshop
This two-day workshop--held as part of the TMC’s co-located Call Center 2.0 Conference--covers all the elements of deploying and managing a team of ‘Home Agents’. Learn about the VoIP technology custom tailored to work-at-home environments, as well as hiring, training and other HR considerations.

According to TMC, total attendance at last year`s ITEXPO in Ft. Lauderdale topped 6,000 attendees. TMC officials project attendance to exceed 7,000 at this year’s event.

Complete details about all sessions and workshops at the conference are posted at www.itexpo.com.

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While other technology trade shows have scaled back in recent years, GITEX 2006 hosted a larger number of exhibitors than ever before to celebrate its 26th birthday in style. Consequently, the show experienced an unprecedented level of news and announcements from the mass of exhibitors on display. Fear not, for Channel Middle East was there to bring you all the major talking points from GITEX 2006.

For many, the aching feet and tired limbs serve as the ultimate reminder of just how big GITEX has become, but those wanting a more quantitative indication need look no further than statistics offered by the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC), the organiser of GITEX. It claims that the exhibition, which spanned more than 13 halls, took up 62,000 square metres of floorspace — 33% more than in 2005 — and attracted a staggering 130,000 visitors.

The increase in size allowed DWTC to fit in 16% more exhibitors than last year, bringing the total number of companies on show to 1,347. A whole raft of new country groups participated for the first time with Syria, Hungary and Portugal all staging a pavilion to underline their domestic talents.

What’s more, GITEX Shopper and the inaugural GULFCOMMS exhibition also proved a massive hit. Local retailers exhibiting at Shopper reported a rise of as much as 45% in sales compared to last year with total transactions surpassing the USm mark for the first time.

GULFCOMMS, meanwhile, enjoyed a successful debut in Zabeel Hall and received strong backing from influential players in the telecoms arena, such as Etisalat, du and Nokia.
The market’s big guns all had major announcements to make over the course of the week.

In the hardware space, Intel’s global director of digital home brand management, Charlotte Lamprecht, flew into Dubai to highlight the digital home technologies shaping the Middle East consumer market, while Samsung unleashed its latest range of products on the channel, including the world’s smallest laser printer and an entirely new concept MP3 player.

Microsoft hammered home the theme of “People Ready Business” — a philosophy based on giving workers the technologies they need to drive business — in addition to launching its Office, Vista and Exchange products in the Middle East. Rival SAP, meanwhile, disclosed a Middle East initiative to target SMEs.

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The promises came in the opening session of the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference here today, as a panel of luminaries discussed the current and future challenges of bringing the benefits of the digital live to the masses. The city of Hong Kong, represented by its financial secretary, Henry Tang, was held up as a shining example of digital deployment, with its 123% penetration of wireless phones.

Tang maintained it is government’s responsibility to address the multiple issues of the digital divide, including the access divide and what he termed “the usage divide and the usage quality divide.” It isn’t enough to provide access to broadband and other technologies, he said – government must also aid people in developing knowledge based on digital access. He pointed to the growing trend of “offshoring” lower-skilled work as a boon for Hong Kong as it has enabled the city to “free up the human resources in Hong Kong and allow them to move up to higher skilled jobs so that one in three people now in the Hong Kong labor force now have highly skilled or management jobs,” Tang said.

“It is incumbent on the governments of developing technologies to upgrade the knowledge level and skill of the population to create more flexibility to increase business,” he said. “The part of our work force with lower skills faces more competition for jobs so it must consistently upgrade knowledge and skill levels to maintain competitiveness. Knowledge is the most valuable commodity.”

At the same time, government must protect “strict intellectual property rights” and work to overcome different forms of cyber crime,” Tang said.

Xudong Wang, a minister within China’s Ministry of Information Industry, said his country has made substantial progress in building its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure but still has a long way to go. With 77 million broadband users and 890 wireless and wireline phone users, “we are still a developing country with low telephone and Internet penetration,” he said, promising 1 billion telephony users and 400 million broadband subscribers by 2010.

China is also working to bring connectivity to every village, one of the ITU’s goals, Wang said. He pledged to extend the government of China’s “cooperation to product win-win results, equality and mutual benefits.”

Yoshio Utsumi, ITU’s outgoing secretary general, said China and particularly Hong Kong are industry trend setters – China “will soon overtake the U.S. as the largest market for broadband and its growth rate is such that one fifth of the world’s ICT customers are in China,” he said. “It is increasingly the source of new trends. Hong Kong is a living laboratory for new technologies like IPTV and HSDPA.”

Cisco’s Chairman and CEO John Chambers took over the podium when it was his turn to speak, eschewing the seat on the stage that others had used and instead pacing in front of the podium’s dignitaries’ table and even jumping down to pace the floor of the room in front of the audience, to the amusement and delight of the largely Asian crowd.

Chambers urged the audience to share his vision of the network as the platform for new services and new intelligence that enables content to be delivered to a multitude of different devices based resident intelligence that can choose the appropriate device and format content accordingly. Collaboration and interactivity are the next great service fronts, he added, citing the example of a new breed of baseball park. With 20 to 30 cameras scattered around the field, fans using handheld devices of their choice will be able to select the preferred view and wireless send messages, encoded with video, to friends and family who aren’t available, while also scooping out available concessions and game information.

“Sporting events will be about collaboration,” he said.

But it is important for service providers to recognize the dramatic shifts in their business, away from access and transport to creating new services based on network intelligence, Chambers said.

Governments and regulators also have to adjust to change, said Viviane Redding, a European Union commissioner responsible for Information, Society and Media. She cited the success of GSM, based on the work of European service providers and regulators to pick one standard for pan-European digital wireless. Sorting through multiple standards today would be a much more daunting task and one better left to the commercial markets.

By Carol Wilson

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