Voxeo Talks

This week is VON 2009 down in South Beach, Miami, FL. As I mentioned previously, we had a Voxeo presence down at VON, although with some last minute scheduling changes, RJ Auburn was not able to attend. I spoke twice on Monday, first on the future of hosted voice and the second on the future of developer ecosystems and carriers. I recorded both sessions on video and intend to post them here soon.

In the first panel, “Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX“, Adtran’s Chris Thompson and I discussed the future of hosted PBXs with the moderator Mike Oeth from Junction Networks. It was a good session where we discussed how hosted networks can work today, where they are and are not appropriate and what questions customers should ask of hosted application providers. Khali Henderson from VON captured some of the flavor of the talk in her piece: “Hosted vs. Premises PBX: No Contest“. (And yes, she has my title wrong, but that was my title way back at the beginning of the year when we first submitted these talks.)

As she writes, a big part of our discussion was that customers should not have to choose… that hosted, premise or indeed hybrid networks may be appropriate for different kinds of network situations.

My second panel, “The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World“, was quite a fun one in that the panel was just Thomas Howe and I along with moderator Suresh Bhandarkar from Tech Mahindra.

Thomas and I have known each other for a good number of years, are both extreme extroverts who enjoy presenting, have no issue playing off of each other and are good friends to boot. So needless to say it was a very, um, “dynamic” session. I actually felt a bit bad for Suresh because he had done an excellent job as a moderator preparing for the panel and assembling a list of questions for us to discuss – Thomas and I just didn’t exactly go along with some of the questions. Primarily because Suresh was trying to go after the viewpoint “how can carriers succeed in the apps market, differentiate and win?”, while Thomas and I took a dim view of that. In truth, we’d like the carriers to open up more so that other companies can create innovative services on top of the network.

VON’s Khali Henderson did capture some of the talk in “Can Carriers Catch Up in the Apps Race?“. And yes, Thomas did indeed say that the carriers need a lobotomy… the video of this session should be amusing at least.

As to the VON show itself, this was the first year with Virgo Publishing at the helm and it showed that it was a newer show. There were minor little things like no available WiFi (something organizer Rick Martin ensured us would be corrected for the next show), lack of available power or power strips in the rooms… those are just growing pains for tech shows. The sessions themselves seemed well-attended. Both of mine had 50-ish people in them that filled the available rooms. The exhibit hall had a good number of vendors. I wasn’t there for too long to get a sense of how traffic was on the show floor – I left in the middle of Monday afternoon to head up to Voxeo’s office in Orlando.

The VON show continued today and goes on through mid-day tomorrow. Skype’s Chief Strategy Officer will be speaking tomorrow and I’m looking forward to learning what he says. I have hints that there may be some interesting announcements… we’ll see. In any event, I’ll be curious to read other accounts of VON from folks who stayed longer.

Meanwhile, I’ll be getting the video from those two sessions up online in the next while….

Related posts:

1. My presentations at VoiceCon Orlando this week…
2. Did you miss eComm 2008? You can now see the presentations…
3. Dan York to speak at VoiceCon Orlando in March 2008
4. Dan York speaking on “Securing Cloud Telephony” at SpeechTEK in August
5. Voxeo’s RJ Auburn and Dan York speaking at VON in Miami Sept 21 -23

Tags: Conferences, von