Kira Makagon is on the pod today. Kira is the Executive Vice President of Innovation at RingCentral so has a great insight into the UC marketplace. Kira looks ahead into the rest of 2018 to examine some of the emerging technologies that are shaping the industry. We also discuss their focus on simplicity for users and their development plans for the rest of the year.

Joining Patrick on the pod today was Vishal Brown from Yorktel to discuss the potential workplaces of the future and how they can be achieved with Unified Comms and collaboration. Vishal explains that to achieve the agile and mobile workplaces organisations demand, work is required from all factions from end users to systems integrators.

On Tuesday during Avaya's Edge World Tour we were lucky enough to speak to Fadi Moubarak, VP of International Markets at Avaya about their world tour and how they want to boost their partner's Avaya offering. We also spoke to some Avaya partners to find out how the event helps them and what they expect to happen with their Avaya business going forward.

Whilst attending ISE 2018 in Amsterdam last week we asked all of the vendors that we spoke to about why they go to huge amounts of effort to attend events. We tried to find out their main drivers for attending and if that justifies some of the huge costs behind the scenes.

André Hordagoda, co-founder of GoInStore, told us all about their proposition and how the future of online customer services and ecommerce might be drastically different in the future. With over 10 years' experience on the retail technology sector Andre is very familiar with the current systems in place and how these might develop in the future.

Today we look at SD-WAN with Atchison Frazer of Talari. One of the original innovators within software defined wide area networks Talari have great experience of the market. Atchison has a long history within the network industry both in the UK and the USA so was able to give us an overview on the benefits of SD-WAN and talk us through Talari's unique features.

With a long history in the UK channel, working within data centres and cloud service providers, Karl Roe of Nuvias is perfectly placed to give his Cloud Service predictions for 2018. Through the importance of IP and AI as a default for businesses, listen in as Karl gives us his breakdown for the year ahead.

Irwin Lazar joins us on 'Out Loud' as we look at the emerging market trends within the collaboration space. Currently Vice President Service Director at Nemertes Research, Irwin has a broad range of experience across the market sector and is currently working on analysis of the data relating to market trends within Unified Communication and Collaboration.

Following on from our interview with David Danto on Huddle Rooms, UC Today 'Out Loud' discusses his time at CES 2018.David filled us in the most interesting collaboration tech that he saw and also gave us the details on the infamous power outage that took place during the event.The most exciting products that David discusses are universal translators that finally appear to have reached a practical level, after years of promise, that could breakdown the language barriers around the world.

UC Today 'Out Loud' are joined in this episode by David Danto currently a consultant at Dimension Data. With years of experience across a range of industries David gave us his insights into how Huddle Rooms have developed and the trends for collaboration spaces going forward.We also discussed the ideology of such spaces and how organisations can better utilise such a resource in the modern world.