OCRI – Ottawa VOIP Conference

I had the opportunity to attend a local workshop/conference about VOIP. It was very interesting. We got to see keynote presentations by Don Smith, CEO of Mitel Networks among others. His was very poingant and informative about what Mitel is planning to do with the future of VOIP and moreso, Presense applications and multimedia messaging. They seem to have some very cool things in the midst, one of which being the Mitel Navigator. It's an amazing little device that should be released this month. It sits on your desk and turns it into the one stop communications shop. Check out the picture of it below, I know it's old news but It's supposed to be released this month at large. If anyone out there at Mitel is listening, I would like to get a demo unit.

We also heard from Mark Sterling of Telus, and their plans in the VOIP World. They seem to be mainly focusing on the Hosted PBX aspect of things, which was the same impression I got from Bell Canada's presentation and from Ottawa Telecom.

It was interesting to note that many of the people there were very outspoken about their dislike for Bell. The gentleman from Ottawa Telecom even referred to himself as the Anti-Bell. This leads me to believe that smaller entities such as Vonage, which claims to have over 15,000 new signups a week are a good thing because they are driving companies like Bell to realize that people don't like their monopolistic ways, and costing structures. My thoughts make me think that the larger players, while they still have plenty of financial background and money in the banks, they are still scared about losing revenue from their existing infrastructure. This is where companies like Vonage have the market beat because they are not a phone company, and can do whatever they like without having to worry about CRTC issues and whatnot.

There weren't many exhibitors at this mini-conference, but it was still nice to see some smaller companies besides the Nortels and Bell's of the world showing up. I actually made a good contact with a company that is distriibuting some IAX2 ata devices here in Canada. They work off the PA-168 chipset, which is nice to see as an alternative to the Digium IAXY device.

The Conference was pretty good overall, but it was quite the sales pitch. It was geared more towards the business owners who have no idea about what VOIP can do for them, and what it's all about. Most of they speakers were really pushing their version of the product. I would definately attend another event if they offered one.