IR Connect is all wrapped up for another year!
We held our annual conference virtually for the second year in a row, and while it was a shame we weren’t able to connect with you in person, the upside of the virtual format meant we could welcome participation from all over the world.
There was too much great content to go through everything, but I’m going to do my best to summarize the key highlights from the event here.
Vision
In his opening address, CEO John Ruthven launched IR’s new company vision – Create Great when it Matters Most.
As JR said, we are a company in transformation, driven by shifts in the markets in which we operate. Our customers have gone through significant changes over the past 18 months, so have we. Along this journey, we realized the need to redefine our purpose to align with our goals of creating great experiences, insights, systems, and connections.
Our new vision is more than a slogan. It’s the point that the IR Tribe rallies around, giving us focus and stating our commitment to continue to evolve, challenge, and innovate, and support our customers in creating their own version of great.
Innovation
Innovation is at the heart of bringing this vision to life. Kevin Ryder, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, said in his session:
“What keeps us motivated every day at IR is providing the real-time visibility to keep the world connected when it matters most – at times when people need to collaborate and transact. We understand the complexity that our customers must deal with and the challenges that they face.”
More than understand the complexity and challenge, we are passionate about solving and simplifying. We’re rising to that challenge by innovating:
- Our platform – developing the Prognosis Platform into a hybrid cloud platform. Making it the most comprehensive real-time platform for managing collaboration experience management and payments transactions.
- Our pricing – simplifying our packages, introducing flexible bundles that can evolve with customers as their needs change, and making it easier to do business with us.
- Our products – building on our monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting foundations to deliver the intelligence that our customers need to enhance user experience and unlock new opportunities.
Product Strategy
We shared significant product roadmap announcements for both IR Collaborate and IR Transact, with a number of exciting new features, enhancements and products on the horizon in the coming months.
These updates have been carefully considered, developed of the back of feedback from our customers and partners, and are designed to help drive business impact.
For IR Collaborate, upcoming product release highlights include integration with ServiceNow, Webex and SBCs in the cloud, monitoring for Microsoft calling and Direct Routing, personal device management, and video testing.
For IR Transact, we’ve realigned the solution suite to better address the needs of the market, with solutions for High Value Payments, Real-Time Payments, and enhancements to Payments Analytics.
You can get more detail on the product announcements here.
IR Academy
We launched the new and improved IR Academy, our training, education and accreditation program. IR Academy is designed to help customers build their IR product expertise and ensure they have the skills, knowledge and capabilities to get as much value from our solutions as possible.
There is some fantastic content on there, which is added to regularly as we release new products, features, and enhancements. And best of all, complimentary access to IR Academy is available to all IR Connect attendees until 31st December, 2021.
IR Connect Awards
IR Connect wouldn’t be IR Connect without the IR Connect Awards! There’s nothing we love more that celebrating the awesome achievements of our community. This year we launched new categories and took a regional focus, recognizing the diverse challenges our customers are facing. Here are all the very deserving winners for this year.
AMERICAS
Collaborate
| Award Category | Winner |
| Channel Partner of the Year | Carousel |
| Channel Person of the Year | Frank J. Ciccone, II Avaya |
| Operational Resilience (Testing) | Southern Company |
| Managed Services Partner of the Year | NTT Ltd. |
| Innovation | Logicalis |
| Experience Transformation | FedEx |
| Technical Guru | Cedric Jackson and Dimitrius Weddington Cox Communications |
Transact
| Award Category | Winner |
| Innovation | Speedway |
| Experience Transformation | ACI |
| Technical Guru | Kim Katigbak PULSE |
ASIA PACIFIC, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA
Collaborate
| Award Category | Winner |
| Managed Services Partner of the Year - APAC | HCL Technologies |
| Managed Services Partner of the Year - MEA | Solutions by stc |
| Emerging Partner of the Year | Universal Intelligent Technology Inc |
| Experience Transformation | Absa Group Limited |
| Technical Guru | Edwin Koekemoer Absa Group Limited |
Transact
| Award Category | Winner |
| Partner of the Year | MVI Technologies (Thailand) Co., Ltd |
| Innovation | NedBank |
| Experience Transformation | Coles Group |
| Technical Guru | K.V.Ramnath Network International |
EUROPE
Collaborate
| Award Category | Winner |
| Managed Service Partners of the Year | BT |
| Emerging Partner of the Year | Araneco |
| Innovation Award | Sberbank |
| Experience Innovation Award | Capgemini |
| Technical Guru | Steffen Muessiggang Swisscom AG |
Transact
| Award Category | Winner |
| Experience Innovation | Barclaycard |
| Technical Guru | Jappie Toutenhoofd Rabobank |
Congratulations to all our winners!
And thanks to everyone who joined us for IR Connect 2021. Sessions will still be available on-demand for the next few weeks.
We hope we were able to provide the knowledge, training and actionable insights you were looking for, and we look forward to connecting with you again next year.
