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The economic news seems all bad these days, and Nortel’s announcement of 1,300 layoffs and a $3.4 billion quarterly loss hung over the opening of this year’s show like a San Francisco fog. Or at least we thought it would. What we’re finding, however, is that the crowd here–which we’re expecting will equal last year’s San Francisco event–is all business.

Judging by the breakdown in morning tutorial attendance, the big concerns among our attendees haven’t changed: People gravitated to Brent Kelly’s updated session comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 with IBM Lotus Sametime; they also went for David Bryan’s SIP Tutorial, which once again got great reviews; and our new tutorial, with Nemertes Research examining business cases for IP telephony and Unified Communications, was another strong draw. Somewhat surprisingly, we had a light crowd for Gary Audin’s tutorial on saving money for the enterprise by saving power. My take is that, while this is a worthy topic and Gary is a perennial favorite among speakers at VoiceCon, the subject–or at least the need for knowledge on the subject–still isn’t as urgent for this group as our core technology topics remain.

I also had a chance to do some podcast interviews today, including a chat with Jim McQuaid of NetQoS, a management software vendor which, as the name suggests, provides reporting on voice quality in an IP telephony network. Mostly, when people talk about voice quality in IP telephony, it’s of the “Can you hear me now?” dilemma: Just how lousy does the other person sound, and how lousy might you sound? But as Jim and I discussed, there’s another whole issue around quality for telephony, and that’s the question of time to dialtone, post-dial delay and the like. This is another element of the frustration factor, and one that NetQoS can report on.

“The expectations remain those that were set up by the Bell System,” Jim said. We’re willing to wait somewhere between 5 and 12 seconds, “and then we think: This is not working.”

“Human impatience,” Jim observed, “is a renewable resource.”

Tomorrow morning we’ll start the main conference program, opening with a keynote from Charlie Giancarlo, interim and, in fact, outgoing CEO of Avaya. Charlie was named interim CEO earlier this year when Lou D’Ambrosio stepped down for health reasons, and Charlie made it clear that Avaya would hire a permanent replacement. That individual, Kevin Kennedy, currently CEO of JDS Uniphase, has now been hired, and so tomorrow will represent Charlie Giancarlo’s first and last keynote as Avaya CEO. Charlie will be followed by Betsy Frost Webb, GM for Unified Communications Marketing at Microsoft–who we can expect to offer further information on the Office Communications Server Release 2 that was announced last month at VoiceCon Amsterdam.

We’ll follow up with a complete report tomorrow.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Equipment, Management, Market Trends, Phones & User Devices, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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