VoiceCon was in Orlando and I had a pass so I decided to go.   The exhibits were interesting as were some of the break-out sessions, but it was really the hour that I spent watching and listening to Tony Bates, SVP and GM at Cisco, that made the entire conference worthwhile.   More on that in a minute.

What struck me as odd, was that this was VoiceCon, one of, if not the premier national conference for Unified Communications.   VoiceCon is a bit of a misnomer today as the at least half the focus was about video conferencing and collaboration, and another 25% integrated in some way with video conferencing.   What was odd to me was that given the importance of this show and this incredible future technology is that I attend the big keynote today and there were only about 2,000 people in the room.  Of that number my guess is that half were vendors.    Also interesting, my guess is that the total number of attendees was probably 1,500 or maybe 2000, and probably over 1,000 vendor personnel.   Some companies like Cisco brought over a hundred people, and their booth was gigantic.  But I’m a big fan of the NAB show in Las Vegas and in fact I am headed there in a few weeks.  NAB in a bad year will have at least 100,000 people and 200,000 in a good one.   The rooms were cheaper this year so I’m guessing another off year for NAB.   My point is that for a trade show of over 100,000, Cisco’s booth at VoiceCon was only slightly smaller.   And I swear that there was one Cisco employee for every ten conference attendees.   The message was clear to me, Cisco is doing whatever it takes to dominate this unified communications industry.   It will completely take the place of Telco as we know it, and make this type of communications infrastructure ten times as important to the enterprise than the land line POTS telephone was. 

A friend of mine based in the mid-west, had an interview opportunity for a position that he was perfect for.  He recounted at first how cool it was to go to the local Cisco sales office and sit in a video teleconferencing room equipped with Cisco Telepresence.   The last we spoke, he indicated that he has now had nine interviews, all via Telepresence.   Wow, it is Cisco doing this today, it will be many of us doing this in the future.

Although my particular focus has been Internet video, it was great to get some exposure to enterprise video conferencing and what exactly unified communications is about, and it was the presentation by Tony Bates that really got it to gel.  First, he gave a lot of background info about Unified Communications.  There were 3 market transitions:

1^st Phase – Connect Phase  – Enterprises implementing TCP/IP based networks

2^nd Phase – Communication Phase – Voice and data

3^rd Phase – Collaboration – Enables teams to find each other and share ideas

Cisco believes in 6 core tenants that define Unified Communications

1. Open Architecture
2. Secure Intercompany Communications
3. Video Communications
4. Enterprise Social Software
5. Flexible Deployment Models
6. Integrated Experience

In total, Unified Communications creates a New Collaboration Experience

According to Tony Bates, Collaboration is about building trust through rich, reliable interactions -   from text to ubiquitous video.  Tony personally has 5 telepresence meetings a day.

Anyway, the best part of the pitch was the demo.  They demoed a fair number of the applications, and you really understood Cisco’s vision of what true collaboration is.  I get that it will probably take 10 years or possibly more to reach the potential that they demonstrated in the demo, but clearly Cisco eats their own dog food.  Tony boasted that 50% of all of the bandwidth consumed internally at Cisco was video.