Attendance was especially strong in the Unified Communications sessions, which certainly isn’t new at VoiceCon, but it has led Fred Knight and I to finally conclude that UC is the core of the conference, not just a technology overlay on the voice over IP that dominated a few years ago. I don’t think anyone thinks about deploying an IP-PBX anymore without asking themselves, “Then what?” Not everyone has an answer yet, but knowing that there needs to be an answer may be what will motivate people to keep coming to VoiceCon. At least that’s what Fred and I are going to shoot for.

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.

Microsoft’s entry to the market has changed the way enterprise communications decision-makers look at their choices for the future, so it made sense that the software giant brought a couple of customers along with its own keynoter on the first conference day of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, for a discussion of how the enterprise should organize and prioritize for the changes that Unified Communications will bring.

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.

I blogged briefly on Johan Krebbers’ keynote address at last week’s VoiceCon Amsterdam; I focused on the issue of information sharing and collaboration at Royal Dutch Shell, but I want to revisit some of the core communications issues. The big headline out of the speech was Krebbers’ assertion that at Shell, voice is no more important than the other peer-to-peer real-time media. In his talk, Krebbers elaborated, saying that within Shell today, if you travel, you’re encouraged to use a softphone to save on international dialing; the expectation is that you’ll become comfortable enough with the softphone that you’ll be willing to use it when you’re in the office as well.