As we prepare for another two busy days at UC Expo in London, I have a strange deja vu feeling that I’ve been here before. It’s not just the gargantuan ExCeL arena that seems familiar; it feels like a repeat of the same business issues facing customers and reseller partners alike.

Chief amongst these is the inconvenient reality that the jewel in the Microsoft UC crown – Skype for Business – remains incredibly difficult to integrate with an enterprise-grade telephony platform.

We are delighted with the development of NFON AG over the past ten years. TEN YEARS! Half an eternity if you measure it by the rapid pace with which the market for cloud services has developed. We completed our last financial year with a 44 percent increase in sales, which is a huge success and also a significant benchmark for the future growth of NFON – we want to continue to grow quickly in the double-digit percentage range. Our CEO Hans Szymanski recently revealed growth plans and our ambition of 39 percent for 2017.

A new generation will enter the workforce sooner than you realise: Gen Z, those born between 1996 and 2010. Little is known about this younger generation, the children of Gen X, whom will have graduated from university by the end of this decade. At the same time, when they will be entering the workforce, Gen Y – also known as the Millennials – will hit their peak and form 50 percent of the global workforce. Last but not least, the first Gen Xers will begin to retire and bid farewell to the working world. The challenge for organisations will be to cater for the needs of all three generations in an environment that is going through a digital transformation, and where the use of cloud communications services is becoming the new norm.

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the way in which we work and live, yet many commercial and public sector organisations are choosing to ignore or put off the changes needed to successfully digitally transform. Unfortunately for many, the motive is a huge fear of change and the unknown. As we move into what is clearly a digital future, new generations entering the workplace are not even thinking about this change: Digital life is a part of their reality now and not a concept from the future!

Do you keep on hearing how the use of technology made people lose their empathy and emotional intelligence and how how robots will steal all the jobs? To many, digital transformation is a synonym for the dehumanization of our workplace and the society at large – which doesn’t come as a surprise if even a tech pioneer like PayPal and Tesla founder Elon Musk alerts us about the threats of digital technologies and – for that specific matter – artificial intelligence (AI): “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.” We tried to get to the bottom of this fear by looking for the true connection between human and digital as it develops.

When I took up responsibility for partner communications and channel marketing as a senior marketing manager two years ago, I was given the responsibility to help build our partner readiness programme. Now, I am proud to say that our Partner Readiness programme is core to the NFON success story! Without close collaboration with our partners, growth rates of over 40 percent would not have been imaginable. In his recent blog post, our CEO Hans Szymanski reminded us of how valuable every NFON partner is in our community.