Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

VoiceCon Next week

Next week is the annual VoiceCon event in Orlando, Florida. For those of you with any interest in the enterprise telephony space, this is THE event to attend. Based on the number of vendors who've invited me to meetings it looks like this will be another very strong show. Here are the three themes that I think will be big:

• Wireless and mobility - aside from FMC, their's a lot of interest in the enterprise space around integrating mobile devices such as blackberry's and treos with enterprise telephony systems. Expect a lot of announcements in this area
• Unified Communications - last year this was a separate "conference within a conference", this year I expect UC to be the single biggest theme among all sessions, and a quick look at the program shows a large number of UC-related sessions.
• The hard part - infrastructure & organization. Areas such as network management, security, power, resiliency and QoS, as well as optimizing the IT organization to support VOIP and UC continue to be the real challenge in a successful VOIP implementation, I expect we'll see a lot of enterprise case studies that bring us back to reality

I'm looking forward to this show as much as any I've attended in the past. VoiceCon for me is the single best opportunity to get face time with vendors, enterprises, and service providers that are taking technologies like UC and making them happen. I'll try to blog from the show as time permits, but I'd recommend you follow the VOIP Loop site as well as Eric Krapf's wonderful VoiceCon eNews bulletin.

VoiceCon

Gizmo 3.0 & Sightspeed 6.0

Om Malik was kind enough to point me to a post he made today on the release of Gizmo 3.0. For those of you not familiar with Gizmo, it's basically a SIP-based answer to Skype. Being SIP-based, it supports multiple SIP clients (including its own), as well as interconnection to a number of other SIP-based networks. Calls between Gizmo users (or anyone on a peered SIP network are free, and like Skype, Gizmo makes it money on calling to and from the PSTN. Unlike Skype, they also have a mobile client (currently only Nokia 800, 770, and N80 is supported).

Om notes that with version 3.0, Gizmo supports VOIP calling to a number of other IM services such as Yahoo, Gtalk, and MSN (no AIM support just yet).

I tried Gizmo over a year ago but quickly stopped using it since nobody I really knew was on it. These kinds of services are funny in that way, no matter how great the features are, if you can't talk to anyone it is kind of pointless. I primarily use AIM today since that's what almost everyone I know is using. IMHO AIM has become the defacto "standard", especially in the business world. To me, an AIM account is as important as my phone number, and I do as much business via AIM as I do via the telephone. I also rely on Skype a lot, mostly for IM, but also for voice when traveling and often as a substitute for my Verizon Voicewing VOIP phone just because I like the plug in that lets you click on phone numbers in web pages and e-mail to make calls. So while it's nice that Gizmo is adding these features, I wonder if anyone will use them.

That brings me to Sightspeed, PhoneBoy notes that Sightspeed is getting ready to launch version 6.0 tomorrow. I've used Sightspeed a couple of times, mostly to talk to their CEO Peter Csathy. The quality is very good and I've been pleased with its simplicity. That being said, I still prefer to use a phone, though I know in my heart that calls are far better with video since both parties are forced to pay attention to one another rather than drift off into distraction-land. I do think the desktop video market will finally take off when someone figures out how to create a usable multi-party service that supports groups of up to 15 people. There's a lot to be said for using video in group environments, but as an alternative to a one-on-one phone call I can see the case for the traveling business person wanting to say hi to their kids, but not for routine day-to-day one-to-one calls.

Gizmo, Sightspeed

FutureNet 2007

Since 2000 I've had the pleasure of being conference director for MPLScon, an annual conference focused on MPLS technologies, services, and architectures. This year we've decided to broaden the conference a bit to cover areas such as fixed-mobile convergence, WiMax, security, and network management.

The program is now available at http://www.futurenetexpo.com/attend/conf_at_a_glance.html, the conference takes place from April 30-May 3 in New York City at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in mid-town.

Building a Successful Virtual Workplace

We've begun rolling out the volumes of our benchmark on virtual workplace tools and technologies. Volume 1 looked at branch office trends and best practices, volume two covered business cases for collaboration. Volume 3 will cover wireless and mobility, volume 4 covers VOIP business case and strategies, and volume 5, which I'm writing this week, covers real-time collaboration tools and services.

This benchmark covers our analysis and data gathered from approximately 100 interviews with enterprise IT executives across a variety of industries. If you are interested in a briefing on the results, please contact sales@nemertes.com

Catching up on a whole bunch of stuff

Blogging has been pretty slow this month due to a whole bunch of work-related projects, but here's a list of stuff i've published elsewhere in the last few days:

Collaboration Loop:

• February 23, 2007 Google Gets Into UC
• February 14, 2007
Collaboration Trends – Some Early Results
February 05, 2007 Skype’s New Enterprise Offerings – What do they mean?

And a few other items;

• IP Telephony Network Architecture: Manageability Matters - Network World Webinar comparing IPT system architectures
• How to Secure Customer Communications - Cisco TechWiseTV Episode on VOIP Security
  

Also, next week is VoiceCon Spring, I'm doing two sessions on open source on the morning of March 8th.

Nemertes Research VP to Join Network World Editorial Team

Congratulations to my colleague Andreas Antonopoulous on being named as the new security columnist for Network World. Andreas has been writing Network World's "New Data Center" newsletter for several years now. He also heads up research for us in the areas of data centers, security, and open source. He's an amazing guy and I'm looking forward to reading his insights on the security space.

In addition, Nemertes is currently undertaking a benchmark study on enterprise IT security and information protection. If you are an enterprise IT executive and you'd like to spend an hour on the phone with us in exchange for a copy of the study, please contact us to arrange a call.