A not-for-profit telecommunications user group is bringing back its independent trade show to Canada for a second year.
The International Telecommunication Professionals Exchange conference, which takes place on Sept. and 20 in Toronto, is aimed at telecom and networking professionals looking to connect with their peers, meet top industry vendors and stay educated on emerging trends. This year’s exhibitors include Aastra, Avaya, Bell, Broadconnect, Capella Telecommunications, Citel, Conveyant, Esnatech and Genband.
Topics will range from managing quality Voice-over-IP performance to how organizations can implement cloud-based unified communications, said Joan Moyer, the president of IPTX.
For Moyer, the biggest draw of ITPX could be the fact that it is not a vendor-specific trade show. She added that because many of last year’s attendees were telecom and networking professionals from across every level of government, keeping the user group event independent will ensure their attendance for a second year.
“We do ask the vendors that their talks are not a sales pitch,” Moyer said, adding that conference attendees are looking to hear which new technologies are coming down the pipeline, what potential issues may arise from these technologies and other implementation tips.
Moyer, who used to be the telecommunication manager at the City of Toronto, said the conference is hoping to fill the void left by the non-defunct Canadian Business Telecommunications Alliance (CBTA) event.
Other topics set to be discussed at the show include how to integrate UC collaboration in your current environment, how to deploy hosted VoIP and UC, the future of UC, how to reduce costs when deploying IP phones, and tips of VoIP migration.
Mitch Simcoe, applications project marketing at Genband, said his company’s talk will focus on mobility and UC for the PBX-like Centrex service. Simcoe said he will show Centrex users that they don’t have to throw away those old phones and can actually evolve to IP-based Centrex, which extends to mobile devices and tablets.
“Many of the big banks are traditionally big Centrex customers,” he said, adding that in many ways, its biggest enterprise customers are like “little carriers,” support up to 15,000 lines.
“We actually have carriers that are a lot smaller than that,” he said.
The ITPX end user group has been organizing and hosting the annual conference in the U.S. for the past two decades. The next even takes place in April 2012 at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
