Report on IT-Expo in Los Angeles

I just returned from the Internet Telephony Expo in Los Angeles where I gave a tutorial on Number Portability. Overall the conference was good. I am always interested in trade show attendance and vibrance since it is a good business indicator for our market. Overall attendance at the keynotes seemed to be up from last year and the exhibit hall had about the same number of booths. More importantly, I did not detect any gloom. The continued growth of VoIP in a recession is a good sign for rapid growth of the VoIP business when the overall market rebounds.

Interestingly, my 8:30 am tutorial on Number Portability was well attended. By most measures, the topic of Number Portability registers about zero in terms of excitement. Couple this with an early morning time and I expected just a few of folks in the room reading the paper while they drank their coffee. Instead, the tutorial was well attended and the group was engaged, asking a lot of questions throughout. One gentlemen told me that a last minute call from his CEO, who was stuck in traffic, instructed him to attend the number portability tutorial and take notes. In the past, VoIP folks dismissed number portability as insignificant. But things have changed. We have found that up to 40% of our customer's VoIP traffic is to ported telephone numbers. This means that their least cost routing, without number portability correction, is wrong for 40% of their calls. The simple implementation of routing calls based on the ported number can increase a VoIP provider's net income by 4% to 8%. This is not a revenue increase, this is cash income straight to the bottom line. One TransNexus customer tells me that our analysis is much too conservative and that the savings is significantly greater. All driven by an easy to implement database dip. Everybody loves easy money, I guess that is why an early morning tutorial on a dry topic drew such a keen crowd. You can download the presentation from www.TransNexus.com.

Internet Telephony Expo Update

I have spent the last two days at the Internet Telephony Expo in Los Angeles. It appears that the Internet Telephony Expo has benefited from the demise of the Voice on the Net (VON) show. In a down economy, the number of attendees looks to be up slightly from last year and the number of vendor exhibits appears to have increased.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on Open Source and Open Standards (download presentation). What impressed me most about the audience was how little they knew about VoIP and telecom. I see this as a very positive development as more people from enterprises are being drawn to learn about VoIP. VoIP is now spreading beyond the developers and early adopters. The audience is now people who are looking to solve real world problems, not futurists.

The most popular sessions at the conference have been the sessions on SIP Trunking. The audience at these sessions appeared keen to get the practical insight they need to make decisions on how to replace PRI circuits with SIP trunking services. While I have not heard any buzz about the latest and greatest new innovations, it is nice to see VoIP technology maturing with real and wide spread deployments.