Signal to Noise

I got to Atlanta Sunday afternoon and was fighting with the hotel Internet access all night. It seemed that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my PowerPoint presentations over to Kasey at Pulvermedia by any means. I tried e-mailing them, nope, port 25 blocked. Tried e-mailing them via webmail, nope connection timed out repeatedly. Then, I finally tried FTPing them up to my web site so Kasey could grab them and put them on the show laptop. Still no luck. So, come Monday morning, I found myself running around the conference center with a USB drive graciously provided by the VON folks, and appropriately colored pink (I think pink may have been the vogue of VON Enterprise, as Jeff Pulver showed up Tuesday morning for his keynote wearing a sharp pink dress shirt).

The pre-conference sessions were well-attended in my estimation. Carl Ford kicked things off with a brief introduction Monday morning and served as an effervescent emcee for the duration. My first presentation was an Intro and Welcome talk, where I went over the brief history of telecommunications, which I suggest started in 1851 with the sending of the very first commercial telegraph over lines operated by Western Union. I got into how the Web 2.0 ideal was hinted at during the late 90′s with viral videos like the Dancing Baby and precursors to Delicious and Digg–among which I counted “Am I Hot Or Not”.

And while the crowd was very gracious, having to kick the day off for the likes of top networking strategists and product managers at Cisco (who I’ve unabashedly bashed more than a few times), Avaya, and NetQoS really made me realize how much rich talent and excellent thought leadership we have in this corner of the business world. Even the folks in my own audience (there were two pre-conference tracks) were those who, in many respects, are more accomplished than myself. So I learned as much as I taught, without a doubt.

After doing the Intro and a Myths and Facts about QoS session, I ate lunch with Greg, the CEO of GlobalTouch. After talking to Greg in some detail and gathering the thoughts of several others, it is resoundingly clear that the integrators in the trenches want more support from the big manufacturers for certain open protocols that solve problems–like IAX through NAT as an example. It seems abundantly clear that neither InGate nor Cisco have any plans of EVER proxying IAX on their session border controllers. Another thing a lot of people are concerned about is Network Neutrality. One independent VoIP provider confided in me that was about ready to strangle the speaker from BellSouth, because it sounded like the same old propaganda (charge Google extra because they’re so successful, etc.).

I also finally met Matt Florell of VICI Marketing, Matt Lazaro of Avaya, and Jeff Hicks of NetQoS, who all came through with excellent presentations during the Pre-conference. I wish Avaya would abandon terms like Service Oriented Architectures and IMS though. Some of those Avaya concept drawing slides have so many lines, blocks, and callouts that I found myself scratching my head and thinking, why don’t they just call this distributed user-empowering idea “voice 2.0″ like everybody else? But that’s Avaya for ya.

After the presentations in my track finished up, most of us headed over to the SIP trunking roundtable, where Rich Shockey was making an impassioned and impromptu appeal to everybody who would listen for ENUM. The PBX people (well one of them, whose name I don’t recall) referred to ENUM as just “another LCR scheme” and possibly didn’t understand that it’s a directory-like extension for DNS that resolves phone numbers to URIs. The open source people in the room tuned into Shockey’s comments, but the white-hairs were less than enthusiastic. Then, Carl Ford cracked a joke and the tension disappeared as the room burst into laughter.

Dinner time came and went, and a few of us were sitting at the Atrium Bar in the Waverly hotel (a fabulous place, by the way), when none other than Jeff walked up. He busted my chops a bit–interestingly Jeff did NOT have a  digital camera with him at the time, though he did share some nifty stories about his camera and its occasional trouble-making antics. We talked quite a bit and I ended staying up too late to reliably board a shuttle and an airplane at the world’s busiest airport. The good news is, through the haze, I’m not sure how I got home, but I’m back in Cleveland and looking forward to reading other people’s accounts of the second and third days of VON Enterprise, which are going on now.