ITEXPO

I just came across a blog post from Dan York the intellectual power behind the Disruptive Telephony blog and Director of Conversations at Voxeo. In his post he mentions he will be at ITEXPO and collocated events and even posted a schedule of where he'll be in case you want to find him. Great idea.

Ruth Bridger and Bill Soto just had a podcast interview with social network maven Suzanne Bowen of DIDX where they discuss their open source/Asterisk-based solutions providing enhanced functionality for PBXs. Moreover they discuss specific solutions for vertical markets such as hospitality and Reseller Week at ITEXPO which takes place next week in Miami.

Resellers looking for new products to carry should take a listen.

My views have shifted on net neutrality over the years to the point where I firmly believe that carriers have the right to recoup investments they make in networks but at the same time I understand fully well that IP communications is dependent on traffic not being impeded by a carrier looking to promote an alternative service. Having said that, there are a number of peering points located around the US – only a few places where fiber exists in enough quantity to allow massive interconnections between hundreds of carriers, enterprises and web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook.

Terremark owns one facility – the NAP of the Americas in Miami, Telx owns another at 60 Hudson in New York and CoreSite at One Wilshire in Los Angeles are three of the more prominent locations in the US ”carrier hotel” market. At industry gatherings I have often asked about the possibility of Verizon or AT&T purchasing one or more companies in the space and the answer has always been that it would be bad news.

It’s no secret that both Microsoft and Google are looking at white spaces and Super WiFi as an area of growth allowing inexpensive broadband wireless signals to be transmitted over long distances.

But technology is difficult to predict – we didn’t know for sure tablets were going to cannibalize PC sales but they are and we didn’t know small, cheap hard drives were going to cut the legs out from the large, expensive hard drive market. You may know that in 1997 when I went to COMDEX and told the world TMC was going to launch a magazine called Internet Telephony – people laughed and told me it wasn’t an industry.

Ten years later after a few “overhype” phases, VoIP software maker Skype has devastated the long-distance market and is hiring by the hundred.

According to BlackBerry's BlackBerry Enterprise Server Add-on product website, support for Microsoft Lync is coming soon. In the footnotes it says "Support for Microsoft Lync Server will be available in an upcoming BlackBerry Enterprise Server Service Pack." It will be released as part of BES 5.0.3 which is still in beta. BES 5.0.3 was expected to be released in Q4 last year, so 5.0.3 should be released any day now. Notable new features include:

• Support for Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Lync Server 2010
• Support for Microsoft Office 2010 file attachments
• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtualization platform

Microsoft is participating at ITEXPO next week and some Lync partners as well, so I'm sure there will be some Microsoft Lync-related announcements made at the show.