Everything old is new again — VoiceCon

VoiceCon is the big telephony convention. It is underway in Orlando — just next door to DisneyWorld. The location seems somehow ironic. Just as Disney is expert and re-inventing itself one sees “old” players insisting that they are new and improved.

But everything new is old again — and the reverse is also true.

Along with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and going “green” we have the even more secure networking vendors — and the biggest buzz of all? Why, Unified Communications of course!

UC (as it is known to its friends) is focused on making people “reachable” where ever they are — on one device. These days the average person has an office phone, a cell phone, a home phone, corporate email, personal email, an instant messenger (or two) and probably more I’ve forgotten to mention. I seem to recall a statistic that said the average American has seven (yes, 7) ways to be reached.

So we are forever checking multiple places and playing “phone tag” ad naseum. The promise of UC is that we can identify “where” we are and UC will let those we want to find us find us. (Those we try to avoid may still wind up in voice mail heaven). In UC verbage this is called “presence awareness.”

In other words big brother (UC) knows where you are. This is your “presence.”

At VoiceCon Avaya introduced their Intelligent Presence Server which they say takes UC another step forward — not just presence awareness, but presence information across multiple sources.

Nortel’s big pitch at VoiceCon is based on “mobile” UC. Siemens has had this for awhile– your office phone number is the one number given out and it can be routed to any device — including your PC or your cell phone. Nortel is tying the idea of UC with FMC (fixed mobile convergence) so that when you are at your office you don’t pay the cell phone company for minutes — your call is switched to a WiFi connection.

The problem here isn’t the technology but the cell phone companies who (for the most part) won’t allow phones that can be FMC capable on their networks. They aren’t dumb and they don’t want to lose the 30-50% of network revenue that goes away with FMC.

Still, that is Nortel’s pitch.

Cisco announced enhancements to its CCVP® professional-level certification. Why no big announcements like Nortel or Avaya? Hey, they don’t have to. Cisco is the leader in Unified Communications by far – with 50,000 Cisco Unified Communications customers worldwide and more than 70 percent of all Fortune 500 companies using their UC offer.