Phil Fasano was well positioned to give a business-level view of communications technology in his VoiceCon San Francisco keynote this morning. Fasano is senior VP and CIO at Kaiser Permanente, and he said at the outset that “information technology is the differentiator” in the health care market, where Kaiser uses technology to drive prevention, which in turn is the engine of cost reduction for health care providers.
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.
Greetings from beautiful Amsterdam, where our first-ever European VoiceCon event is wrapping up its first day. The big news from today was Microsoft’s announcement of Release 2 of Office Communications Server (OCS), but there was plenty going on all day as we crammed tutorials, keynotes and exhibits into a lovely autumn Tuesday in the Netherlands.
Last week, Jim Burton wrote a piece entitled, “UC: It’s Not About Buying a New IP-PBX.” I agree with Jim, which is usually the smart thing to do, but at least to me–Jim may disagree–his mantra doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy a new IP-PBX. It’s just that the IP-PBX is not synonymous with Unified Communications.
As we’ve begun discussing the program for November’s VoiceCon San Francisco conference, Fred Knight and I have been looking for ways we can program sessions around the issue of communications’ role in saving energy. To get the obvious point out of the way: This isn’t about saving the planet. There may be some specific corporate directives around “Green” initiatives whose aim is corporate image-building, but what we’re talking about here is the immediate and long-term effects that high and rising energy prices will have on enterprise IT systems and human behavior.
