It was my great pleasure on Jun 26 to be a part of the Network World IT Roadmap event in Santa Clara! For this event, I was interviewed in front of a live audience of about 60 CIOs for the Voice over IP (VoIP,) Convergence, and Collaboration track by Johna Till Johnson, president and chief research officer at Nemertes Research. For those who are interested, some highlights of our conversation are below:
You did a network overhaul that included a VOIP implementation a number of years ago, correct - 2003?
Yes, we were fairly early adopters of the technology. In fact, 802.3af (PoE) had just been finalized a few months prior to our first (pilot) implementation. We had the switches on order, but because of obvious delays in finalizing the switch hardware to meet the spec, we had to borrow some proprietary inline power injectors from 3Com to power our phones until the new switches came in. We probably received the first PoE switches off the line from 3Com.
How large is the implementation?
17 locations that are separated geographically. About 800 handsets now, a variety of hard sets, some softphones, wireless.