ITEXPO

Here at ITEXPO West 2011 in Austin I am watching a panel discussing the death of the public switched telephone network during a special keynote panel. Items being discussed are who will pay for the upgrades to E911, will the move save power, how do we deal with the fact that existing equipment is breaking down with no available replacement parts and finally, what will come next?

In conjunction with ITEXPO here at the Omni Hotel in Austin Texas, TMC's Juliana Kenny conducts an interview with an Avaya' Chris Lynk to learn about the communications company's web.alive immersive avatar-based conferencing and collaboration platform.

As Rich Tehrani said, "One lucky ITEXPO West 2011 Austin attendee will win this Jeep. You must be present to win on Thursday, Sept 15th at 2:45pm at the Austin Convention Center in Texas." I still remember one ITEXPO where a guy just left the show and his co-workers frantically tried to find him but to no avail. He missed out on a $25,000+ vehicle. You must be here to win. Can you imagine the ribbing this guy got when he found out he basically just gave up a $25,000 prize?

Here's an image Rich snapped of the Jeep prize. I'd snap one myself, but busy interviewing companies in the press room.

At ITEXPO I met with Artisan Infrastructure's CEO Brian Hierholzer to discuss how Artisan offers a compelling cloud-based solution for MSPs and service providers. Brian explained that one problem with existing managed service providers (MSPs) is that they often compete against their service provider customers by building and selling applications. Brian explained that competitors such as Amazon and Rackspace are now offering their own hosted applications, which undercuts service providers trying to offer hosted applications such as BDR (backup & disaster recovery), email, and hosted phone services leveraging VoIP.

Artisan on the other hand is a 100% pure play wholesale infrastructure services provider. They don't do any business direct to end users so they don't compete against service providers that use their service to build applications.

As you can see, the exhibit hall for ITEXPO is coming together in the Austin Convention Center. Here is a shot of the registration counters being constructed and the hanging of an aisle sign for the collocated MSPWorld.