IT Expo Wrap-up - Day 2
After a lack of time and an annoyance with my iPhone and the WordPress application, I decided to just give a general wrap up of yesterday’s events…
I was able to catch the tail end of the Service Provider Roundtable moderated by Andy Abramson. Companies participating in the discussion were Packet8, Broadvox, Telefonica, TW Telecom, and MagicJack.
So my first real session of the day was the keynote session with John Frederiksen General Manager of Microsoft’s Response Point, and Digium CEO, Danny Windham. The hourlong keynote was split into two half hour speeches about each company’s take on the current VoIP market. While John was interesting to listen to and made some fascinating points, I was more interested in hearing what Danny had to say about the current state of Asterisk.
Then the show floor opened and I waded through the over 150 exhibitors. One of the standouts was Snom (who Switchvox has now added to their Auto provisioning feature in their 4.0 release.) The Snom Snow edition phones are definitely different and caught my eye. I was able to get my hands on a Snom 820 so expect a review in the near future.
I had a firsthand demo from Cashton Coleman from IonLogix. He showed me the inner workings of their Phone Manager 2008 platform. His blog is a great read and I think he has a fascinating take on the Asterisk world.
I also took a look at the AdTran TA900 gateway’s. They can be used to provide SIP trunks to legacy PBX systems. The system will convert SIP to PRI that the legacy system can speak hence “VoIPifying” the legacy system…
I bumped into Mitchel Constantin (who you may remember as the developer of “Snap A Number” which Digium bought from him last year) while at the Switchvox 4.0 overview given by Switchvox’s Tristan Deganhardt. Mitchel’s new company, Weavver, is doing some interesting things in the Asterisk space. Stay tuned for news and products that Weavver is now currently developing and testing. I can’t talk about it publicly, but he is on to something…
Shortly before the show closed I attended a “Bullseye routing” demo given by Interactive Intelligence. Now what caught my eye here is the award in the picture. “Best SMB Solution” was what it read… SMB Solution? There is nothing SMB about Interactive Intelligence and their solution. They don’t pretend to be SMB and will always claim to be an enterprise solution. I asked one of the InIn folks and she wasn’t sure what that was all about but would look into it. I even approached TMC’s Greg Galitzine about it and he told me he’d look into it. Greg I’m going to hold you to that and expect a response… 🙂
So that was Day 2. I’m heading over for Day 3 and hitting the airport this afternoon. Hopefully I win that Jeep they’re giving away.
-chromiszach