Telstra Vantage 2017 was a hit like all previous years! It drew 6,900+ attendees. The event’s purpose was to bring together technology solutions, partners, and businesses in the hope that technological innovation will lead to increased business productivity and growth.
Calibre One had the privilege of being able to send Hayley Imlay and myself from the Northern Territory team. We attended the event and met over 60 customers from South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Far North Queensland.
The conference kicked off on Wednesday morning with a keynote from Andy Penn, CEO of Telstra. He shared his own story of the changes in the economy and the competition in the market. He also mentioned how the NBN is changing the world and how challenges like these are challenging businesses today. Andy emphasized Telstra’s $3B investment commitment last year and how it will support a new and changing world moving forward.
One noteworthy subject during this keynote was the Internet of Things (IoT) where any and all devices being made in future like washing machines, drones and cars are all developed so they can connect to the internet, Telstra switched on their new IoT network last month.
New Product Announcement
Telstra Liberate, a new product that had been in the works for a year, was unveiled at the conference. In summary, Liberate allows customers to present their fixed line number when dialling out from their mobile. It has integrated Telstra fixed line and mobile channels at the network layer rather than requiring the use of an app. No additional hardware is required for users to operate a full PBX phone system from a fleet of mobile smartphones. See the full story at CRN.
While at the conference, we noted some interesting technologies on show. We have summarised four of the technologies we thought were the most interesting this year below.
Microsoft Surface Studio
Microsoft at the front of its stand was showing off its most recent device release, The Surface Studio. It comes with a 28-inch PixelSense Display (the thinnest LCD monitor of its size), featuring 13.5M pixels at 192 PPI. There’s True Scale and individually colour-calibrated TrueColor.
There’s a 1100:1 contrast ratio and a wide colour-gamut display that switches between sRGB, Vivid (P3-D65), and DCI-P3, which Microsoft boasts delivers “more colour than 99 per cent of the world’s desktop monitors”.
I must say, it’s a very sexy looking device. But it has an expensive price tag, with the RRP starting just shy of $3,000.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
With a lot of continued buzz around Amazon, AWS made a show to the event featuring its Facial Recognition platform Amazon Rekognition. It is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, faces, recognize celebrities, and identify inappropriate content in images. I had the opportunity to see Hayley’s celebrity lookalike using the technology. And it gave an 80.9% match to Lili Sepe.
Amazon states that the practical applications of this technology span many industries. Citing an example of where this technology is used in police patrol units, with police uniforms coming with small wearable cameras expanding the eyes of police force to identify people and crime faster than ever before.
IBM
There has been a lot of chat about Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the conference this year, IBM had on demonstration IBM Watson, a supercomputer that combines AI and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a “question answering” machine.
The IBM team demonstrated the virtual bot. It integrates with online chat environments on websites or via contact centres to significantly reduce time spent finding answers. An interesting product to watch as it develops in future.
Infosys
The team at Infosys talked us through their use of Virtual Reality equipment HTC VIVE with which they have created a tennis and retail store experience. They explained their software AI platform for enterprises “Infosys Nia“ with the help of which they are churning out some great insights, through data analytics, to players and how they can improve their game. The view is to re-imagine the sport and bring new, innovative technology to excite and inform the billion fans, the players, the staff and every stakeholder in tennis. Both myself and Hayley had the opportunity to get a game with a virtual Roger Federer, unfortunately both of us are terrible Tennis players and likely made fools of ourselves.
A theme of security concerns
Talking with many of our customers this year, as well as the vendors and other partners at the conference, it was interesting to note that a key concern on many customers’ minds was security. Many customers are acknowledging that the internet of things where we are now connecting many, many devices to the internet is exciting as it presents many commercial opportunities. However, many acknowledge the flip side to this is a lack of regulation and standardisation around security protocols in the industry. There was a strong bent this year towards security and the place it plays in today’s world. It was great to see many of the vendors such as Fortinet and Cisco show casing their capability to combat this problem and hear about the technologies at play.
Final thoughts
Finally, the two-day event ended with the final key note given by Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist. He talked around the subject of motivation and productivity within the workforce.
Another successful year at the Telstra Vantage conference. I recommend that the next conference to follow is the Microsoft Summit, which is coming up on 14-17 of November in Sydney. Definitely watch this space.
