There are some changes ahead, and I want to set the stage, so none of you are surprised. The Realtime VoIP Community and this associated VoIP Conversation blog are going to be getting a new face (and a new URL).

When Realtimepublishers and I began the VoIP Community last year, there was a real focus on enterprise VoIP technologies. That focus isn't going away, but it's broadening out soon.

Over the past year, VoIP has shown constant, steady growth and progress, but communications technologies tightly wrapped in the VoIP mix have also elevated. VoIP remains vital to communications technologies, but it's not always center stage. It's a step forward on the road to unified communications. VoIP is not the end game. It never was. It's a milestone along the way. VoIP has achieved and is achieving critical mass in many ways. It's a carrier technology. It's an enterprise technology. It's a consumer technology. But VoIP isn't the only technology in unified communications. 

As we noted in all the talk surrounding the VON conference this week, video has become a key technology. Video is a key piece in more that one way. Certainly there's the impending wave of IPTV or Television over IP. I see TVoIP as being something completely removed from IPTV. To me, IPTV will become broadcast television over Internet technologies. Mass delivery of television news and entertainment using new media. TVoIP seems different. It's about place shifting, user control, and multimedia streams from a variety of sources, delivered to a user's TV, PC, PDA or phone using IP technologies. I may be splitting hairs over a fine point, but things like Slingbox and SightSpeed place-shifting are more TVoIP than IPTV in my view.

Wireless continues to grow. 2G, 3G, 4G and fixed mobile convergence advances clearly show that the communications environment is changing. And it's changing quickly. Wireless and VoIP integration via FMC are going to be hugely important pieces of the communications puzzle over the next couple of years.

IMS is simply the carrriers' tool for unification and service delivery. I don't see it as anything more than a service delivery tool for carriers. But it's a tool that lets wireless and wireline carriers more effectively bundle services...if they use it wisely. So far, I'm not sure they are.

IP is the unifying protocol. In the enterprise, it might be the corporate WAN. In the larger world, it's the Internet. Regardless, IP has proven to be what the designers intended. It's a resilient, reliable architecture that can deliver anything that can be digitized - date, voice and video.

The shift you'll see ahead here is that the VoIP focus is broadening out to encompass a wider technolgoy set. We're moving from VoIP to Unified Communications. And we're shifting architecture a bit as part of the facelift. The VoIP Community has run on a DotNetNuke framework from the beginning. That's changing. This blog began inside that architecture, then moved to Typepad when we quickly determined the need. That's changing too.

The new face will move to www.realtime-unifiedcommunications.com soon, although it's under construction behind the scenes right now. We'll be putting redirects in place for anyone who hits the existing URL. The platform is changing, and a new blog face, running on Movable Type will provide both the face of the community and the promary entrance point for those articles and discussion forums our members use. It's still all free, but the community itself will still require registration to participate in the discussion forums there and to access the resource library.

The podcasts will continue, and grow. The VoIP ThinkTank will still be here, but we've never constrained ourselves to jsut VoIP. There will be more podcast interviews and video blogging as well.  I already have three podcast interviews scheduled, with more to follow.

Stay tuned. If you've been with us since we started this last November, rest assured that we're not going away. It's time to turn things up a notch.

Ken




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