Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

Time to Get Ready for Catalyst!

Burton Group's annual "Catalyst" conference takes place the week of July 11th at the Manchester Hyatt in San Diego.  This will be my sixth Catalyst event, and each year the conference has grown in both size and scope. 

I will be teaching a half-day tutorial on SIP on the morning of July 11th, then hosting an enterprise "Birds of A Feather" on VoIP experiences the afternoon of the 12th.  On Thursday July 13th I will be presenting a session on communications convergence, which will explore trends toward integration of VoIP with other real-time and collaborative applications in the enterprise.  Finally, I'll moderate what should be a great round-table with representatives of Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft and Siemens as we discuss "The End of Telephony", exploring if traditional telephony systems will be replaced by converged communications clients as well as communications interfaces embedded into enterprise applications.

This year will feature our first "cross-cutting" sessions on application and network security, which will include one of the sessions I'm looking forward to most, Cullen Jennings' presentation of "VoIP Security: Fear or FUD", a topic which has received a lot of coverage in the past few months.

Catalyst is an amazing time for us here at Burton Group, there is no time that is more grueling, yet more professionally rewarding for all of us.  For me the thing I look most forward to is the ability to meet face to face with so many of our clients, and discuss their issues in a casual setting.  As a virtual company, it's also the one time we get to meet each other in person.

Catalyst is open to non-Burton Group clients as well, registration information can be found here.  I look forward to the opportunity to see many of you at the event.

CTC Day 2

I had the opportunity to attend numerous sessions on Day 2 of CTC including James Surowiecki's wonderful keynote on the social dynamics of group collaboration, which fellow CTC advisory board member Stowe Boyd nicely covered on his blog. In addition, Microsoft and Nortel participated in a discussion on convergence of various forms of real-time communication into a presence-based system, though I think there was broad agreement that we're a long way away from the ability for truly interoperable systems that will be necessary to support such a model.

Fred Knight moderated a session entitled "Convergence: The Key To Collaboration" on the infrastructure track during which a lot of discussion over the underlying network requirements to support real-time communications were brought up. As with many discussions of this sort that I've seen in the past, there was considerable debate over the ability for the public Internet to support real-time services (those of us using Skype would argue that the public Internet is often just fine).

Finally, I moderated a session with Dr. Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University and Peter Saint-Andre of the Jabber Software Foundation. The purpose of the session was to debate the roles and merits of SIP/SIMPLE versus Jabber XMPP for real-time communications. While all the attention right now is on SIP/SIMPLE, Peter pointed out that Jabber has an installed base of over 10 million users including significant adoption by the U.S. government and the financial services sector. In addition Jabber protocols are often extended to deliver sevices beyond IM. Both panelists were in agreement that there was a role for both protocols in the future and that co-existence and interoperability could be achieved.

After my session I got to see a few minutes of my colleague Peter O'Kelly's presentation on collaboration interoperability before making the 7 hour journey back to the Northern Virginia area (yes, 7 hours from Manhattan to Virginia), courtesy of a 2 hour flight delay, traffic delays that kept me from an earlier flight, and construction delays on the ride home.

As I noted earlier, the discussions from all CTC sessions are being continued at on the CTC Wiki.

CTC: Day 1 thoughts

Yesterday was day one of the inaugural "Collaborative Technologies Conference" at Chelsea Piers in New York City. The conference has been extremely interesting thus far, and very well attended. I had the opportunity to sit in a couple of sessions in the afternoon before participating in sessions on network performance requirements for real-time communications, and a panel session on real-time communications dashboards. I've also had the opportunity to meet several individuals in person that up until this time I've only chatted with via e-mail, including Larry Cannell, Laura Bauer, and Michael Sampson.

Michael gave me some very good food for thought after the dashboard panel. I went into the session assuming that dashboards were fairly well defined as a client that converged multiple forms of real-time communications into a single interface, but it was obvious as the session went on that there really isn't a good industry-wide definition of what a dashboard is, and that dashboard capabilities vary greatly among vendors. Michael provides his own thoughts on what he's seen so far at his "Shared Spaces" blog.

In addition, the Corrante blog has it's review of Tom Malone's opening keynote (which I missed due to a 30 minute backup at the Holland Tunnel).

SIP to grow leaps, out of VoIP bounds

SearchEnterpriseVoice.com has published an interview I did with them about the present and future of SIP.

IDG: Skype does video conferencing and more

I'm quoted in a IDG/PC Week article by Stephen Lawson on the emergence of a Skype "ecosystem".  Shameless plug aside, it's a great article covering some of the rapidly emerging third-party services and products that leverage the Skype network (and yes, Skype is quickly becoming a network service rather than just an application).

Russell Shaw on VoIP Security

Once again Russell Shaw at ZDNet's "IP Telephony Blog" has a great post on the state of over-hyped VoIP security concerns. This time, Russell quotes from a post on Slashdot which backs up the position that IPT security threats are at the present time, being overblown.

CTC Wiki

The CTC Wiki is now available. Be sure to check it out for information from next week's Collaborative Technologies Conference, or as a resource for collaboration information.

SIP Interoperability

One of the major concerns with SIP is that the current specifications only standardize methods for implementing a handful of the most widely used telephony features. Vendors wishing to build SIP-based systems that support the hundreds of legacy features must do so on their own, and then offer up their implementation for others to support or to test against.

From Network World this week comes word of a new initiative called "SIP-B": "While not an IETF standard, SIP-B, or SIP for Business. Which Network World states "is a multi-vendor effort to outline a set of advanced features for business telephony networks". According to the article, SIP-B would define an interoperable set of standards for advanced SIP-based features.

I've stated in past reports on SIP and related technologies that what has been missing in the SIP world is a "WiFi Alliance" type of organization that would certify SIP interoperability among different vendors. While the SIP Forum's "SIPit" events do give vendors the opportunity to test interoperability, there is no vendor-neutral third party that can certify that disparate vendor equipment will truly work together. Hopefully the efforts to develop the SIP-B standards will go a long way toward realizing the goal of truly interoperable SIP-based products and services.

Collaborative Technologies Conference Next Week

Next week is the inaugural "Collaborative Technologies Conference" at Chelsea Piers in New York City.  The focus of this event is on the convergence of collaboration and real-time communications, and how emerging collaboration products and services will impact the enterprise.  I'm proud to be a member of the event's advisory board and I believe we've put together an excellent program.

I will be moderating two sessions during the conference:

• "Real-Time Communications Dashboards" on Monday June 20th at 3:00 PM featuring Ed Simnett, Product Manager, RTC, Microsoft, Jeff McElroy, Director, Personal Productivity Products, Enterprise Communications Applications Division, Avaya and Vijay Bhagavath, Senior Strategist, Siemens Communications
• "The Standards Debate, And Why It Matters to You" on Tuesday June 21st at 2:15 PM featuring Dr. Henning Schulzrinne, Professor, Columbia University and Peter Saint-Andre, Executive Director, Jabber Software Foundation, Jabber

Actiontec Internet Phone Wizard

The folks at Actiontec were kind enough to send me an Internet Phone Wizard for evaluation purposes.  In effect, this box is a Skype ATA (anlog telephony adapter) that allows you to transform an ordinary analog phone into a Skype phone.  The box is about the size of a small hub and it plugs into your PC via USB cable.  It also has two RJ-11 outlets, one for a phone, the other for your home phone line.

The way it works is pretty simple, you connect it to your PC, fire up your Skype client, and set speed-dial numbers for people in your Skype contact list.  You then call them using the phone connected to the IPW by dialing their speed-dial number.  Or, you can initiate a call using your Skype client and then pick up the telephone connected to the IPW to talk.

If the unit senses that you've also pluged a POTS line into it, all calls by default go to the PSTN (which means that dialing 911 won't present a problem).  To dial Skype contacts you must press "# #" before dialing the speed dial number.

You may also use the unit to dial PSTN numbers via SkypeOut, and incoming calls to your Skype account (either via SkypeIn or other Skype contacts) will cause your analog phone to ring just like a normal phone.

Unfortunately, the device only works with Windows PCs, so I'm not able to actually test it (I'm a Mac user), so I'll keep my fingers crossed that a Mac version will soon be available.  The IPW certainly looks like it has the potential to bring Skype to the masses, and eliminate the need for a headset.  I'm assuming that it will support speaker phones as well as cordless phones, providing a great deal more flexibility to Skype users.