The Spring 2006 VON Conference and Expo is opening its doors this week in San Jose. Several of my team members will be speaking at the event covering topics like security, ROI, and competition for IP Communications. Jeff Pulver managed to make VON "the" voice over IP conference and meeting point for the industry, and this year's spring conference will probably set another record for all the VON venues so far.
Each new year seems to be poised to become the inflection point for VoIP adoption. Today's 16 million VoIP subscribers are still a small fraction of the over 200 million broadband users and an even tinier part of all the 3 billion+ worldwide phone lines. The 16 million figure doesn't include the 74 million Skype registered users (with a record 5 million users connected at the same time), or the over 70 million monthly users of Yahoo Messenger who can now make PC-to-phone calls. But what will speed up VoIP adoption moving forward ?

Improve and simplify customer experience. Guaranteed quality of service, (good) customer service, security, and safety are the traditional Plain Old Telephony Services (POTS) features, but today's VoIP services don't always provide that level of service. On top of that, since VoIP prices are going for the floor, service providers need to provide a unique customer experience for IP Communications including video, collaboration, unified messaging, call manager, virtual call center, web services integration, directory, and calendar to create potential for premium prices. Sun provides the Java based middleware software that powers all these applications, but we are also driving creation of innovative services through our Open Service Delivery Platform program.

More mobile handset supporting VoIP with WiFi capabilities. For instance, with RIM adding WLAN capabilities to its blackberry phones, it means one more step closer to fixed mobile convergence. The more recent announcement of RIM integration with Google talk is a good indication of what's to come in IP Communications partnerships. Carriers have to respond to these new services or risk to be disintermediated from their customers. Sun is part of the expert group which is working on JSR 180 to define the APIs to enable SIP-based applications for Java handsets. Stay tuned for more on this soon.

Open standards based infrastructure and services. What happened to the internet in the 90s, will happen to IP Communications which are just the next level up. I recommend reading the discussion on Jonathan's blog to draw the parallel with documents as well. This is all converging anyways. Open standards are also introducing new and aggresive competitors that require a new and different response from the telcos: buddy list, ring and ringback tones, personalized services for specific communities, integration with all digital content (music, video, TV).

And as far as performance, reliability, and low TCO: it's rock solid carrier grade servers and Solaris 10 integrated with SAF-compliant highly available software plaftorm. If you combine this with our newest CMT servers, you got yourself an eco-friendly engine to profitably deploy any IP Communications solution.