VoiceCon Preview: Navigating the Nascent Mobility Movement

Sure VoIP and Unified Communications have mainly been put into the wireline box for most of telecom history, but within the last few years, mobility has become a major part of business expectations, and now integrating mobile technology into a Unified Communications (UC) platform is a task that many enterprises are seriously looking at. Christopher Dean, CSO of Skype, said at the IT Expo show that while 3G wireless systems were too bogged down for advanced communications platforms, "4G will bring the full creative power of the Internet to the mobile Internet."

Skype has been making big pushes to get on to the mobile platform--striking a deal with Verizon to be embedded on their smartphones, hinting that iPhone Skype over 3G will happen 'soon' and making bold claims that the future means making Skype video calls from anywhere. Skype isn't the only company getting into the game as numerous companies have created 'VoIP' software apps that run over WiFi for the iPhone and other devices, and in early February the first VoIP over 3G app called iCall was approved and made available on the iPhone.

A lot of these advances were a tad consumer-facing for our focus, but luckily Agito with its RoamAnywhere platform launched a mobile enterprise VoIP and UC offering that promised high availability, redundancy, security and enterprise scalability. In addition to the iPhone, the product is compatible with some Blackberry and Nokia devices.

So although still in its infancy, mobility in the VoIP and UC industry deserves a look and VoiceCon will have a few panels to help you explore this side of the market. On Tuesday in particular, there is a panel called Integrating Mobility and Unified Communications: Comparing the Vendors' Solutions which will demo a number of offerings currently ready for market. Find out how to combine your mobile phone systems with your UC systems, the additional costs and the cost savings. Reps from Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Mitel, NEC, RIM, ShoreTel and Siemens will be on hand to walk participants through some of their current mobility offerings.

For more check out VoiceCon's list of mobility panels...