Dust bunnies aren't warm and fuzzy.

What's in your closets, equipment rooms, homes and offices isn't either.

We're in the midst of our annual VoiceCon Tour, a series of one-day conferences that's already hit northern and southern California, and today is in Chicago, with New York the week after Thanksgiving. By a twist of fate, I've wound up as the Chicago and New York presenter for the opening panel discussion, which is on "SIP's Changing Role in Enterprise Communications." The exercise has forced me to re-examine where I think SIP is and what it means.

A little context: This particular VoiceCon road show is focused on the payoff from IP-telephony/convergence, with a particular emphasis on unified communications and contact centers. So I really looked at SIP in that light--i.e., how does SIP help enable these next-generation communications capabilities?

Last week for the second time in several days it appeared that one of our customers lost a switch and after dumping the logs and sending them along with a copy of the switch configurations to the factory,  we were advised to flush the ARP (address resolution protocol) cache on the router.

Occasionally, I'll buy a VoIP/IPT book to see what's on the market and whether I want to recommend it in my seminars. I commonly find that the books I select are either too basic, focus too much on either the voice side or data side of the organization, cover every bit-and-byte (a good read for the sleepless, better than sleeping pills), or are written for the carrier not the enterprise. (I also sometimes wonder who checks some of these books for technical accuracy!)

I received a copy of  Voice over IP Fundamentals, Second Edition from Cisco Press. Although some of the material has a Cisco focus, I recommend this book for both the voice and data staffs that are moving to VoIP/IPT, and here's why.

At the recent International Association of Messaging Professionals (IAMP) Conference, I was privileged to organize and moderate a panel of four enterprise managers of voice and unified messaging systems with the theme, “Feedback from the Front Lines.”  And boy, did UC vendors get some feedback.

Microsoft has announced a lot of new friends lately, some more special than others. When it comes to unified communications and its LCS (and future Office Communications Server 2007)  product, Microsoft claims that while it plays with all the other kids on the street, it has a special relationship with Nortel (kind of like Nortel is Microsoft’s best friend?). But, Microsoft and Mitel announced recently that all demos of UC at Microsoft Technology Centers around the world will be using Mitel equipment, including Mitel 3300 CXi, Live Business Gateway, Navigators, and Mitel 5340 and 5224.

So why are Mitel’s UC products being installed in these Tech Centers instead of Nortel products? If Microsoft and Nortel are such good buddies, shouldn’t Nortel’s products be on display instead?

Yesterday a story crossed the wire touting a $300 million deal won by Alcatel with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).  A host of technologies are included among those to be delivered:  data and voice, wired and wireless infrastructure, optical transport technology and my personal favorite, contact center applications. 

Curious as to what role the contact center would play in what was termed by Alcatel as “an IP network transformation project upgrading the health care provider's communications infrastructure,” I went to Alcatel’s in-house contact center business, Genesys, to discuss their role in this win. 

As we near the end of the year, the "best of 2006" lists are starting to emerge.  A good one was just posted by Dan Rosenbaum on Fierce VoIP: the "Fierce 15" in the VoIP world.  As Dan notes,

I took some care to include leaders in the infrastructure, carrier and application worlds. I have a particular belief that the companies that will succeed most brilliantly are the ones that succeed in building an ecosystem around themselves, and that brilliant applications are at the forefront of today's VoIP industry.

Some of these companies you've heard of. Some, I bet, you haven't. But you should. These are the best of breed for 2006.

Check it out on the Fierce VoIP site. 

Quality of Service (QoS) appears in numerous documents, white papers and articles as a solution to the network performance requirements for VoIP/IPT operation over data networks. QoS can allocate limited resources on a network for real-time traffic, but QoS does not make a poor network better. The health of the network can be the real determining factor in performance.

I just finished editing an article for the upcoming December issue of Business Communications Review magazine on federated presence. The author is Cullen Jennings of Cisco, who's a veteran SIP guru and IETF leader, and he writes great technology articles. For the forthcoming BCR, he describes what's required to unify the presence status and reachability of enterprise users.

Since Cullen's the technologist, I won't even attempt to delve into the details, though it's a very clear read. What I want to address here is the future role of telecom technologists in a world that's dominated by unified communications and technologies such as federated presence.

Watch and lamp type of batteries cost just a few bucks.  Where are they in your IP-PBX, how do they get replaced and what happens when they go bad?

While not the problem it was five years ago, it remains conventional wisdom that about 50 percent of electronic shopping carts are abandoned.  This can be attributed to any number of factors including lack of sufficient information on the product, the complexity of ordering procedures or a reticence about communicating one's credit card number for fear of it being intercepted. 

This week I was briefed by a venture-capital backed firm, MODASolutions, on their answer to credit card fear.  They have a solution that can help people avoid having to give a credit card number - complete with every piece of personal information that goes with it up to and including the secret digits added to cards in the past few years – to complete a transaction.