This morning at breakfast Time Warner's Cable's Deane Leavenworth spoke about how he sees the future of telecom being limitless. He spoke for 20 minutes to a large group of conferees who came from as far away as Australia and Saudi Arabia to hear him speak.

Anoop Gupta from Microsoft then kicked off the keynotes and wowed the crowd with his vision for the future of technology and collaboration. Gupta thinks telephone numbers are like IP addresses and we don't want to remember these numbers. Communications needs to be people-centric in his opinion. There are 800 directories at Microsoft that correspond to various PBXs and Gupta says they don't need to be there.

Gupta says we need to find a way to work together to get people communicating across technologies and across corporate directories. He then touched on how his company is working with Yahoo! and others to integrate IM platforms.

Gupta says we need to use the right modality and use the information in a shared manner The applications need to know who your friends and business associates are to ensure that the right people know your presence at the right times.

There are many communications modalities and voice, e-mail and IM are crucial. The latter is especially important for the younger market. Video too is coming soon.

Presence needs to be embedded in communications processes and CRM applications.

Another crucial comment is that we need a subject to come with incoming phone calls and this is exactly what I have mentioned before is needed for my vision of Just in Time Communications.

According to Gupta developers still are confused about what platforms they need to develop for. There needs to be simplification.

Technologies that are shipping today in Gupta's opinion are going to give us a glimpse of the next generation connected communications world. He showed portals containing the presence of colleagues and an Outlook screen with the ability to see incoming phone calls. Gupta used the term "federation" across companies and across disparate messaging systems. When this happens "The presence becomes richer," he exclaimed.

Out of office information comes too late in Gupta's opinion and it should be given to you at the start of the message, not after it is sent.

Overall Gupta kept the audience focused on what he was saying and the attention level was very high. The people at ITEXPO were very hungry for what he had to say and soaked up the presentation like sponges. I am looking forward to the rest of the day and can't wait for our next ITEXPO which will take place in Ft. Lauderdale, FL in about 85 days!