Paul Kapustka's Blog

In his afternoon keynote Monday, Covad CEO Charlie Hoffman told the crowd of several hundred Sylantro users, partners and developers here at the Venetian resort megacomplex that VoIP has yet to hit the curve part of the hockey-stick chart, calling it a technology that is behind its expected runup rate.

Does that mean Hoffman and others are soured on VoIP? Far from it. Rather, they are just resetting expectations with the lessons learned from the marketplace, which say that finding worth beyond simple cost savings -- the low-hanging fruit of the VoIP market -- is a task that takes time, effort and money.

Hoffman, who told us after his talk that getting big is the only way to survive in a rapidly consolidating telecom marketplace, noted that Covad has spent a lot of time and money training its service reps and resellers, and a lot more money getting its network ready to handle national and global demands. And Nortel's Earl Philmone, from that company's applications server group, told the crowd that even though much of VoIP is standards-based, Nortel and others have spent "as much energy working together [on interoperability issues]" as they did developing new products.

Not to say it was all doom and gloom; Sylantro CEO Pete Bonee talked enthusiastically about how the mix of IMS and Web services (Web services! old school buzzword alert!) might truly accelerate new-feature offerings from service providers and other partners who choose to use Sylantro's VoIP application server software base (which is found amongst VoIP offerings from Microsoft, BT, Covad and Bandwidth.com, just to name a few), not just in the areas of enhanced voice services, but in the true marriage of desktop and voice applications.

Nortel's Philmone mixed his fervor with a little castor oil -- saying things like "IMS delivers the killer environment for killer apps,"
and "even though it [IMS] is calculus, there are people who like calculus," meaning that yes, it's tough work, but there are smart folks willing to sweat a bit.

And as we all learned Monday night, things can get brighter even when they seem at their bleakest. Or something. Hey, you try to blog after watching that game. More tomorrow.