We had more than 40 entries for Best of VoiceCon, which for the first time ever is a juried award, with entries evaluated by a panel of industry experts. The finalists represent a good mix of companies large and small, as well as products representing broad-scale communications platforms as well as point products aimed at security and management. The fact that two of the products—NET and Cisco–are primarily aimed at connecting diverse network elements shows how important such network “glue” solutions will be in the future.

It really makes a lot of sense: For workers who want or need phones, they’ve already got phones. Giving them a new IP phone doesn’t just cost you a lot of money rebuilding the closets, it adds on the less-quantifiable but still real costs in re-training end users on the new phones, imposing changes on these users in return for incremental improvements in the functionality of an appliance whose fundamental look, feel and function has remained essentially the same.

Much of this reluctance to upgrade has been predictable and even predicted — for example, Dave Michels suggested last year on No Jitter that IP phone sales had already peaked. What’s different now seems to be that, per Irwin’s latest blog, enterprise decision-makers are starting to agree.

As Irwin suggests, this is a critical moment in many enterprises’ deployment of next-generation communications technologies. Many enterprises are ready or are getting ready to resume investments in communications technologies, in anticipation of an economic recovery — but they aren’t necessarily inclined to simply pick up where they left off when rollouts slowed down almost two years ago. They’re revisiting the whole architecture, and increasingly, they’re not seeing a reason to invest in new IP phones.

I want to emphasize that the purpose of these awards is to recognize forward-looking, even revolutionary product offerings. We’re at an inflection point in the communications industry: A lot of the fundamental assumptions about architectures and elements of communications systems are being called into question. What will the future really look like in enterprise communications? Of course we hope that the whole VoiceCon event, conference and exhibition, will help you answer that question, but we especially hope that the new Best of VoiceCon award will become a lodestar for the migration.