VOIP to be front and center at Networld+Interop

Computerworld - One of the acronyms that's expected to dominate this week's Networld+Interop show in Las Vegas is VOIP.
Voice over IP has become one of the hottest networking topics this year, and a study that's being released this week by N+I organizer Key3 Media Group Inc. found that 28% of the 631 respondents were already using or installing VOIP systems. Another 51% said they planned to deploy or were evaluating the technology.
On a more cautionary note, Key3 said 68% of the survey participants who had undertaken VOIP projects indicated that the required work was more difficult than they had anticipated. The survey was conducted during February and March.
Sheila McGee-Smith, who runs her own consulting business in in Pittstown, N.J., said the buzz around VOIP is partly a result of the fact that the networking industry is seeing routers and switches turn into commodities. Networking vendors "are looking for new dollars," she said. "It's the shift toward 'What else can I sell?'"
Networking and telecommunications vendors are expected to hit N+I attendees with a steady barrage of VOIP-related announcements. But Bill Flanagan, an analyst at Burton Group Inc. in Sterling, Va., said he hopes that potential users will retain some healthy skepticism about the technology.
IT departments still have to learn how to manage IP-based voice systems and figure out how to deliver consistent sound quality, Flanagan said, adding that many vendors also have yet to fully plumb those depths. "What do you do when someone tells you their connection sounds bad?" he asked. "Because that's the complaint you need to be able to fix."
Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, said he expects VOIP, pervasive security and virtual private networks supporting both voice and video communications to be hot topics at N+I. "All of those have come of age recently," he said.