We recently held our 2023 MetTel Innovation Summit at the JW Mariott Resort in San Antonio. The 9th edition was our biggest and best yet (like everything else in Texas)!
It was great to see so many familiar faces in person as well as a number of first-time attendees and special guests. As always, our mission was to innovate with emerging technologies and share best practices and insights. But we also had some fun—ask anyone who attended our first-ever MetTel Rodeo, complete with cowboy hats, longhorns, and armadillo racing! Some of us are still trying to work off all that Texas BBQ!
Back to our prime directive: we thought it appropriate to think about innovation as a bet against, not a sacrifice to, this challenging environment. In these unsettled times, we all tend to cut costs and lower risks. However, today’s innovation fuels tomorrow’s growth. Don’t stop innovating (or believing) and you’ll never hit a dead end.
With client feedback and Gartner research lighting the way, we put together an agenda that reflects the needs of 2023 but with an eye toward the future. Our agenda focused on what we believe to be the top IT priorities today at a macro level—1) securing your enterprise against risks and 2) transforming your enterprise with AI for opportunities.
Our security keynoter, Eric O’Neill, shared his unique experience with the FBI catching Soviet double agent Robert Hanssen two decades ago and how threats to security have expanded exponentially since then. We heard from our SD-WAN technology partner VMware on their development of SASE, Edge and Endpoint Protection, all areas of double-digit growth, according to Gartner and other experts. Diving further into endpoint protection, Samsung showcased its industry-specific devices, secured by its Knox software solution. We delved further into how mobility is solving industry-specific challenges in a panel discussion led by Max Silber, MetTel’s VP of Mobility & IoT. We also heard in rather entertaining form from David Kay of Sotera Digital Security Corp., who has a highly specialized device and operating system that has never been hacked.
We pushed the envelope a bit further this year with a focus on Web 3 and blockchain as an enabler of everything from security to customer experience. Alan Vey, CEO of Aventus took us through the underlying trends driving Web 3 while Gartner predicts that blockchain will add over $3 trillion in business value by 2030. Alan dove into what exactly Web3 and blockchain mean, why now is the time to start exploring this technology for your business to get ahead of the herd instead of catching up when it’s already taken off, and how to approach this new innovation. The keynote was followed by an insightful panel where Alan was joined by Ed Fox, MetTel CTO, as well as Robert Palatnick, formerly of DTCC and Hyperledger, and David Kay, CEO of Sotera. The conversation explored several interesting topics, ranging from the versatility of the technology and the importance of exploring beyond its most renowned (but controversial) use case—crypto—to regulation and compliance as well as demonstrating that they are as relevant today as they will be in the future.
If security is playing defense, then we went on offense with artificial intelligence—now considered the single most transformative technology for enterprise IT. It’s projected to grow 31% by 2025, well above the overall software market. Despite its seemingly unlimited potential, there is a “black box” of unknowns about how it “thinks” and where this could all lead. A case in point was my intelligent avatar, “LT2,” who always seemed to offer her opinion whether it was wanted or not. She went on to throw some shade at her peers—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. As we went along and she learned more about me and the Summit, she seemed to want a greater role—mine!
Nina Schick, our extraordinary artificial intelligence keynoter, further expounded upon the growing capabilities of AI as demonstrated by the sudden rise of generative AI. Nina increased her famous prediction to over 95% of online content generated by AI by 2030. And if that wasn’t enough, Ed Fox hosted a generative AI workshop with Connor Grennan, Dean of NYU Stern School of Business, Lori Mazor of Synthetivity, and Natalie Kaminski, CEO of Jetrockets. I think these sessions were eye-opening in terms of showing what technologies like ChatGPT and Google Bard are capable of as engines of productivity while also not perfect in emulating human behavior…not yet, anyway.
Ben Rigby of Talkdesk and Dave Rennyson of SuccessKPI gave both macro and micro-level views on the trends driving CX, the migration to cloud, and how AI can improve it. Another aspect of leveraging intelligence was discussed in the context of the mobile edge with Max Silber and Jason Collishaw of Google. Ryan Crandell delved into how AI can impact IoT on a panel with plenty of industry use cases from MetTel, Geotab, BeWhere, Forward Thinking, and our client, Kristi Duarte of Joeris Construction. A number of MetTel clients in attendance immediately identified opportunities to transform their company fleets after hearing the real-world examples from this session.
Another area of growth is space communication and while we have already deployed SD-WAN over Starlink, we addressed the other end of the spectrum with our industry-leading partner, Iridium, which provides ultra-secure, reliable satellite connectivity anywhere in the world regardless of weather conditions. We heard from several attending clients that this could be a good option for network backup connectivity. Those who attended our Customer Advisory Board meeting volunteered to participate in our Managed Network Services Dashboards pilot program.
In addition to our clients and partners, I would also like to acknowledge our guests from Gartner and CHIEF. We hope to continue this new tradition. We’re excited about the progress made at this year’s Innovation Summit with our content and record-setting client and technology partner attendance. If there are technology trends you would like to see us explore at next year’s Innovation Summit or would like to attend, please email me at lthomas@mettel.net or Mike Azzi at mazzi@mettel.net or contact us on LinkedIn.