VoiceCon: A view from the show floor

VoiceCon was a great place to check out the competition's offerings. While cruising the show floor and meeting with a bunch of our industry's leading companies, I got to see a few unified communications offerings, video deployments and application development tools each with their own style and quirks as well as their shared capabilities that seem to be coming standard.

Some of the neat innovations I saw involved crossing device and communication borders. I saw Polycom's Conferencing call reminders that chase you from your desktop calendar and desk phone, to your smart phone or--if you are the event organizer--even automatically call you on your preferred number based on where the system knows you are. A few number presses over at the Nortel CVAS booth would move your desk phone call to your mobile. Siemens even built into their system the ability update your presence preferences from your Twitter feed--Tweet that you just landed in D.C. and OpenScape 2010 will update your presence making you available on your cellphone again and later on at your D.C. office phone once you arrive back at your computer.

On the video front, I saw Polycom use half the bandwidth to provide high profile video conferencing--showing some real promise for ways we can deploy video calling even with limited bandwidth. Cisco had a conference room on the show floor showing off their TelePresence system that puts life size people on a screen across the table from you as well as a shared video whiteboard. After a while you realize that the crisp images of live people are not only on the other side of table--and across the country--they are also looking back at you--the future of communications is not for the shy.

Although a lot of the action was user facing, a few companies were also worrying about building applications on the back end. In order for those unified communications (UC) offerings to chase users or automatically notify people within the system of meetings or calls, applications need to be developed to make it all work. Avaya's ACE, which was once part of the Nortel offering, now has the Avaya DevConnect developers making applications for UC deployments in programming languages regular hackers can understand. ADTRAN also showed off how their drag-and-drop development tools will help harness the power of UC for non-programmers.

All in all it was great seeing all the innovative pieces of our industry in action. What was your favorite part of the show? -Mike