[Anatoli Levine, our Director of Product Management in the US for the Technology Business Unit, is headed to ITEXPO. He wanted to share with you his expectations of things to come .]

I want to talk about expectations. You got that right. Arguably, it is the moments in life when you expect something to happen, are the best things that come out of it. Not when you already got what you wanted (or not), but the expectation of something [good, exciting, interesting] to come.

As an analogy, I would like to bring my next favorite subject after technology (or is it the other way around?): wine. When you smell the wine, it immediately creates expectations. This is literally the best part of the wine experience. Not only because you can do it indefinitely (as opposed to the actual process of drinking the wine), but also because it sets your expectations and creates anticipation, and (hopefully) it makes you want to drink that wine even more than when you just got the bottle in your hands.

Am I going too far off a tangent with all this mumbling about expectations in a blog where we should be talking about technology, you may ask?  Well, let me answer that: Have no fear – we are talking about technology here (and nope – not a new high tech way to drink wine). The actual subject I want to discuss is, in fact, the ITEXPO conference, which takes place next week (September 1-3) in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

ITEXPO

What ITEXPO has to do with expectations?  Well, some clever people from TMC, managed to set my expectations very high. How? While ITEXPO is a staple conference, there is a promise of additional great content surrounding it – 4GWE, SmartGrids and M2M, all of it artfully brought to everyone’s attention.

Enterprise communications, the main subject of ITEXPO, continue to evolve to the next level. High Definition Voice and Video, as well as Unified Communications overall, hold a promise of providing us with much better communicators than we currently have (hmmm, can you believe it?).

4GWE – we have scarcely deployed 3G (at least in US), yet we are hoping to jump straight to 4G: bigger pipes, no wires anywhere and ubiquitous broadband even on top of mountains – will that happen, and if it does, can I have all of it tomorrow, please?

SmartGrids and M2M – what the hell is that? Yep, exactly – I actually want to know the answer, as SmartGrids hold a promise of unparalleled ubiquitous computing and communications, and M2M is about cars and robots talking to each other, and to us, humans, occasionally – but come on now, what is it for real? Don’t know about you, but I do want to get some answers. And so, my expectations are set in anticipation of getting those answers (some, at least) next week.

I would guess by now it is obvious where I was heading with my expectations spiel. As usual, the danger of high expectations is a potential mismatch – continuing with the wine analogy, great smelling wine can be not up to your taste at all (have you had this happen at least once?).  I really hope my expectations will be met, and I will learn lots of new stuff which I promise to share. I just hope, after all that has been said here, I will be able to meet your high expectations…