Avaya, Cisco, Nortel tech chiefs on enterprise IP telephony apps in the oven

I'm sitting here in the audience at VoiceCon in San Francisco, checking out the CTO Roundtable.

Line-up: Mun Yuen Leong, CTO of Avaya; Phil Edholm, CTO & VP, Enterprise Network Architecture, Nortel, and Hank Lambert, CTO, Cisco.

Each are talking about network management-related IP data and voice R&D, what's in the labs, etc.

Lambert: Everybody has talked about Service Oriented Architecture that always goes over a network. We are working to make that network provide important aspects (of network SOA). Another area is in fixed mobile convergence, (and the fact that) knowledge workers need to work well in mobile. The problems (occur) when you want to provide functions on their mobile phone. You can't get voice and data off simultaneously. He praised 3G capability for simultaneous voice and data sessions.

Edholm: SOA is a fundemantally different challenge. It has now moved into these framework, an is object-based paradigm for application development.How do we take the value sets we have in telecommunications, to the next level of how you build conferences and applications. Bring interaction and information together with (business) process change. We start that with personal productivity, the next challenge is to exhange this into the SOA space.

We talk about control functions like SIP and SOA, and what happens at media play transition between the circuit based and packet based enetwork. You don't have to hang the phone up. Conferencing becoming essentially free. What happens when you have 20 connections open to 20 o 30 conferences? How do we manage that environment? Edholm mentioned control point as the managerial hub for a virtual conference room.

Leong: noted the next big trend is going to be integration and convergence at application layer. We talk about solutions for home worker, but we believe convergence of applications at backend. Leong then explained the concept in which a location device would be placed next to stack of equipment.

"That device has GPS and brings back to a central process. You move from system to system event to a system that can actually do the work," Leong said. He then explained a scenario of smart GPS' that would enable different points, where different users are located, contact each other automatically without the user having to invoke the voice call.