March madness!

Graham Francis : The SIP School
Graham Francis
| The SIP Blog is just that; with opinion and analysis on all things SIP in the world of VoIP

March madness!

Phew! what a month March was – I was running around all over the place and The SIP School team rarely saw me.

First up, UCexpo in London at Olympia on the 6th.

This was a great show and apart from the fact that a cancelled train service almost made me miss my own session it was a well spent day.

My main observation from the show was that there was a big presence from Microsoft and a lot of other manufacturing/service companies wanting to show that they are working hard to enhance a ‘Lync based’ UC solution with their own offerings.  Cisco had a very small presence though it’s big rival Avaya did have a reasonably sized booth though right up the corner?  Maybe ‘middle and centre’ is needed to ensure that it’s not a bigger ‘Microsoft show’ next year?

My own session was a ‘full house’ smiley-laughing and here’s the link to the video of the presentation if you want to take a look. http://online.ucexpo.co.uk/Videos/What-s-up-with-SIP – you have to register (for free) to view it.

 

I will also point out that there are lots of great videos from many others on this site so please check them out.

On March 21st I was off to the House of Commons in London (UK) to present an award that The SIP School was sponsoring at the ITSPA awards.  It was a first time visit to the House of Commons and I was happy that security was tight before being allowed in.  The buildings (of course) were fantastic to see and I even spotted a ‘Bill’ being passed from the House of Lords to the main chamber by a Barrister (including the long wig).  Everyone had to stop moving to let him pass through – very interesting indeed. 

Anyway, the award.  It was for the Best VoIP CPE product and was won by Yealink for their SIP-T38G.  Here’s Phil from Yealink (on the left) and myself (on the right) 



There was an ‘Highly Commended’ award also for Gigaset - DX800A All-in-One

Now onto Enterprise Connect on the 26th to the 29th.

First up, a completely unexpected free upgrade on the flight from London to Miami – Club Class on BA (many thanks and please feel free to do this again smiley-cool) this really sent me off on the trip in a good mood.

Now, Enterprise Connect is always a massive show and for me, one of the best places to meet new contacts and old friends.  It is certainly the perfect place to ‘network’ and the exhibition hall provides a great place to see the new products and services from all the giants of this industry.  The biggest stand was Cisco’s with Avaya, Siemens, NEC and HP not far behind.  Traffic on Wednesday seemed to be a little light so it would be interesting to see the attendance figures and also to see how many of the people there were 'paying' visitors as opposed to exhibitors, press, speakers and others. 



Again I had my own session “SIP fundamentals and Interoperability”.  This was a 2+ hour presentation in a massive room,  I think I managed to fill half of it and will try for a full house next year – if they will have me back smiley-wink.    I got a lot of great feedback and one of the best questions was to do with IPv6 as the person was really confused on the apparent lack of presentations and workshops highlighting this most important of protocols.  Could it be that as a US based show, there is ‘less’ of a panic over IPv4 depletion as opposed to emerging markets (China, India etc.) that have an exploding demand for IP addresses but a ‘historical’ lack of access to big ‘pools’ of IPv4 addresses unlike North America and Europe?  It will be interesting to see what the show schedule looks like in 2013 to see if IPv6 appears in any sessions or discussions.

Well, that’s it for March and into April with The SIP School focusing on a lot of new stuff for the Technical and Sales programs as well as increasing the multiple-language support for the exams.  We have a LOT of exciting partnership deals bubbling under that we can’t tell you about just yet but hope to soon – they are BIG!

Anyway, thanks for reading this post - I am firmly behind the desk for a while now and I'll be back soon asking for your help on a few things so keep your eyes peeled!

Graham

 

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