Now, nobody expects an enterprise, especially at the Fortune 500 level, to ditch its purpose-built process automation software in favor of a communications platform that does BPA. The Interactive Intelligence team—we visited with CEO Dr. Don Brown, marketing VP Joe Staples and solutions marketing director Tim Passios—clearly understands this. But as Don Brown pointed out, a BPA system that’s built into the communications platform does offer significant advantages, specifically the ability to track and display user presence and skills.

The fact that Interactive Intelligence understands the importance of user presence and skills shows that the company’s heritage as a contact center vendor continues to inform its approach to solutions in Unified Communications. It’s been fashionable to talk about the notion of the “company as contact center”—that is, letting the contact center reach out to non-agents to serve as resources—but you could sort of describe the Interactive Intelligence approach as, “The contact center as company.” In other words, the capabilities that communications brought to the contact center can now be applied to anything within the enterprise that uses (or should use) a documented business process—i.e., just about any back-office function.

VoiceCon is kind of the same way. Every year in late winter, our work family treks down to the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, works hard and tries to hit all the marks. Then in November it’s out to San Francisco, the Moscone Center, a week whose rhythms are pretty much the same. Work, laugh, panic, swap stories, try to get it right. Set up, execute, finish up, get out of town.

And for as long as I’ve been involved with VoiceCon—going on 10 years now—it’s been a community. There’s been the comforting feeling of making those familiar treks and seeing a lot of the same faces, whether it’s our A/V team, the speakers who come back year after year, the hotel catering and events folks we’ve gotten to know. And of course the familiar faces we see when we look out in the crowd and when we walk (or, too often, run) through the corridors. Of course there are always new people joining the community, and that’s another one of the fun parts.

The basic issue seems to be that a SIP trunk is an IP connection, and any IP connection can be sniffed pretty easily, and so the question becomes how to combat this. As with so many things, the answer appears to be simple, but not necessarily easy.

The simple, one-word answer is: Encryption. Rich Shockey pointed out in our Virtual Event last week that SIPconnect, the SIP Forum’s attempt to get consensus on SIP trunking implementation, mandates Transport Layer Security (TLS), which uses encryption. The problem, Rich notes, is that, “TLS is not broadly implemented yet,” and would require an update of the SIP stack by developers, and hardware upgrades by some vendors to support the encryption.

* Brent Kelly, who’s delivering our keynote at 11 a.m. Eastern time, will be compressing some of his most significant content from multiple VoiceCon sessions and other sources into less than an hour’s worth of the key takeaways for UC. He’ll combine some of the nitty-gritty details from his VoiceCon tutorials on Microsoft and IBM architectures with the market research data that Wainhouse generates—most notably offering survey results about which vendors have garnered the greatest “mind share” in terms of customers’ stated intentions to buy or consider buying those products.

In addition to this intense content that Brent’s been delivering at VoiceCon Orlando and San Francisco over the past few years, Brent will also offer some new insights about how to proceed with your own UC process—for example: Are enterprises doing pilots? Needs assessments? ROI calculations? Brent will reveal what Wainhouse’s survey base has told them.

Allan’s findings in the “PBX” (for lack of a better term) market echo the findings we carried from Synergy Research about the advanced UC market (which is here on No Jitter http://www.nojitter.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217400543,, and which I wrote about a couple of newsletters ago: http://enews.voicecon.com/2009/05/18/uc-market-looks-wide-open/). These are different markets for different products, but in neither case are we (yet) seeing any shattering of the market-share tiers that we’ve seen develop over the past decade or more.