VoIP developments worth talking about

Lately, the trade-show scene has been improving. And by that I don’t mean more people are showing up; I mean attending companies are actually making interesting announcements. After bamboozling my poor senior editor into sending me to last week's VON (Voice on the Net) show in Santa Clara, Calif., I’m still reeling from the repercussions.

See, VoIP is a piece of my little company’s service offering. Until VON and my recent experience reviewing Epygi (see a near-future issue of InfoWorldfor that review), our VoIP strategy was simple: Stick to a closed network and roll your own. Typically, we’d connect several sites using some variation on the leased-line theme, and then utilize whatever voice-enabled routing hardware best leveraged the customer’s current investment in telephone technology.

VON was going to be my first foray into settling down with a single VoIP supplier, a company with enough depth of product to satisfy at least 85 percent of my potential customer niche, allowing my company to enter into formal reseller status instead of cavorting around like the footloose hardware harlots we are. But instead of reducing my life’s variables at a staid trade affair, I wound up dining on chaos at a show that was very much a live-wire event.

Voice over IP will definitely be one of the darling technologies for the next two years. Hardware manufacturers are throwing new products around like popcorn at a horror movie. That includes huge players like Siemens, Cisco, and 3Com, as well as smaller folks such as Ingate, Intertex, and Zultys. They're surprisingly prolific, but I was expecting as much. What did catch me a little unaware was first the newfound enthusiasm from the carrier sector, and second the contributions from a little company called Microsoft.

The carrier and IP voice provider space is too tangled to delve into VoIP. Suffice it to say that for companies like mine with a strict roll-your-own policy, I now have to completely re-evaluate how and where my clients can save money in this space. If this market sector pulls off what it’s promising, in-house VoIP may be dead in the water. Of course, these companies' track records of living up to such promises are sadly tarnished, and even if they do, nobody knows how the recent overturning of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is going to affect things. Suddenly, rolling your own behind a nice safe firewall might not be such a bad idea.

All that might tempt you to stay away from VoIP, quit the VON show, and go have a G&T at Restaurant O in nearby Campbell. (Try it if you’re ever in town. In a word: Wow.) But then again, you might have a Microsoft press demo. There you might see Microsoft partners showing phone products based on upcoming Windows CE 5.0 working in conjunction with Redmond’s Live Communications Server .My attention was rapt. Working on a vertical CRM as we are, the functionality Redmond showed in this space can keep us busy and selling for several product iterations. Imagine phones that access and modify customer and supplier data, synch with local and network volumes, contact internal as well as Internet-based directory services, and more. It’s coming out this summer, but the early birds have already flown in.