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VoiceCon takes place this week in Orlando, Florida.  Perhaps the oldest and largest show focused on enterprise voice services, VoiceCon has undergone a fairly radical change in recent years.  Sure, we’ve moved beyond “if” debate about VOIP and now we’re discussing “when,” but perhaps more importantly, the conference is no longer about just voice.  Unified communications and real-time collaboration have become key themes as part of the overall program, and perhaps the most exciting aspects of the conference overall.

I’ve been attending VoiceCon regularly since the early part of this decade (wow, I guess it’s time to accept that we’re already in the later part of the first decade of 2000??).  To say VoiceCon has changed a lot from its days in the Washington D.C. area (and the blizzard it attracted in 2003) would be a massive understatement.  With its roots in PBXs (TDM, not IP), VoiceCon attracted a hard-core following of TDM voice experts.  I remember talking to several folks in recent years who still couldn’t understand why Microsoft had a booth on the floor.  What did they have to do with PBXs?

But take one look at the program this year and you’ll see how rapidly things have changed.  Jeff Raikes of Microsoft is one of the four featured Keynotes, and Microsoft is a platinum sponsor, as is IBM.  Last fall unified communications was a “conference within a conference”, this year it is firmly embedded as a key topic throughout the entire event.

So what am I looking for this week?  I think it will continue to be interesting to see how vendors in the VOIP and real-time collaboration space continue to position themselves around the reality that IBM and Microsoft are major players in this space.  Of course I’m looking to get the feel for enterprises and how they see this market developing.  The vast majority of the ones I interviewed for our Nemertes benchmark “Building the Virtual Workplace” saw UC as something they were actively investigating, but they still needed time to get their organizations ready and build a business case for deployment, so I’ll especially look for the end-user case studies to see what other companies are doing.  I’ll be curious to see how the service providers (AT&T and Verizon Business are platinum sponsors) are approaching the UC market and how they are positioning themselves to bring value to their customers.  Finally, I’ll pay special attention to the wireless/mobility vendors.  Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson are all there, as are WLAN players such as Aruba.  It will be interesting to see how they are continuing to evolve their roles in the unified communications and collaboration marketplace.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’m moderating two sessions on open source on Thursday morning, one is a case study featuring two enterprises that have taken advantage of open source VOIP tools, and following that we’ll have a discussion on the role of open source moving forward.  I’m curious to hear how vendors will address enterprise concerns around service, support and scalability that we uncovered in our benchmark interviews.

I’ll report back next week on what I’ve learned.