VoiceCon Wrap-Up

I spent part of this week at VoiceCon west in San Francisco.  The west-coast event is still considerably smaller than the March event in Orlando, but the conference organizers report considerable growth, with about 4,000 registered attendees this year. 

I didn't have much time to see any of the sessions due to meetings, but here's my take on what I heard at the show:

- Microsoft vs. IBM dominated a lot of the discussion, with IBM making significant announcements of its Sametime roadmap, including a dedicated telephony version based on code licensed from Siemens (part of the OpenScape platform).  IBM also made some news by acquiring WebDialogs to give Sametime/Notes users an integrated option for a hosted web conferencing service.  Microsoft focused its keynote on its management tools, which made sense given the audience was primarily folks "in the trenches," responsible for implementing and supporting telephony systems.  Those people need assurances that the system they deploy can be easily managed.

- Reality versus Hype - I noticed that the sessions with the largest attendance were those focusing on operational issues versus those focused on futuristic topics such as presence and unified communications.  I was told that the "Troubleshooting IP Telephony Networks" session on Wednesday was packed, while competing sessions were more sparsely attended.  I was grounded in a session I did on multimedia conferencing when in the middle of a discussion of Second Life as a conferencing platform we received a question from the audience on how best to allow those outside the firewall to access a web conference hosted on an internal server.  Again, my impression was the audience was far more focused on the tactical versus the strategic, reflecting the history of the show and its focus on telecom managers.

- Interest in UM.  Vendors such as ActiveVoice, AVST, and Adomo had significant presences at the show.  I'm seeing a growing interest in UM as a separate focus area, with companies looking at UM strategies outside of their VOIP plans. 

Overall it was a great (and busy) event, made more interesting by massive flight delays in Chicago yesterday and today.

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