Interop NY: What's Top-of-Mind in Enterprise CommunicationsInterop NY: What's Top-of-Mind in Enterprise Communications

Building real-time-ready networks, UC Federation, and of course Cisco vs. Microsoft are among the topics to be covered.

As Microsoft Lync emerges as a potential element of most enterprises' communications picture, I'm getting a real sense of deja vu. A lot of the conversations we're having about how best to implement Lync--or any of its competitors in the Unified Communications space--revolve around getting some IT people comfortable with the demands of real-time traffic, when those folks may not have dealt with such issues before.

The deja vu comes from the fact that we dealt with the same learning curve when data networking professionals, who'd spent their careers building Cisco-based IP networks, found themselves pulled into the implementation of IP-PBXs. These folks certainly knew about issues like packet loss, delay, and jitter, but they weren't accustomed to viewing these metrics as critical; as a result, they weren't used to building production networks that could consistently deliver the required performance along these metrics.

Those folks came around, and now they're dealing with Microsoft Exchange teams who view the world in much the same way: Why can't you just roll out Lync upgrades to Exchange, without worrying about some of these network performance metrics? And in the first generation of Lync adoption, it may not be a critical factor--extra hundreds of milliseconds of delay still don't represent a real threat to effective communications via instant messaging.

But of course, when the enterprise starts looking at Lync as a possible replacement for its voice systems, now it starts to matter--a lot.

This deja vu descended on me as I was editing Terry Slattery's latest post here: "QoS: It Really Is Important." The title pretty much says it all.

Though he's about as unassuming and modest a person as you'll find, Terry's a bona fide rock star in the world of data networking, at least as regards the people in the trenches, building and running the networks. When Cisco celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Cisco Live event this spring, the only person in the audience to get a shout-out from the stage--just before John Chambers was brought out--was Terry, recognized for being the first-ever certified CCIE. In short, the guy knows his stuff.

That's why we've always been proud to bring him to you here on No Jitter and at Enterprise Connect, and it's also why I always prevail upon him to help me out with my side gig, as chairman of the Collaboration Track at the Interop events.

Terry's going to be delivering a session at Interop New York on Wednesday, October 1, entitled, "Building Networks for Real-Time Applications: What Works, What Doesn't?" As I said at the outset, this topic just continues to gain in relevance and importance as more elements of the network move toward real-time performance requirements.

We try to hit the big topics in the Interop Collaboration track, the ones that get covered in even more detail at Enterprise Connect, and we're fortunate to get some of our best experts to join us for those. In New York at the end of this month, we'll have Brent Kelly on Cisco vs. Microsoft; Irwin Lazar on UC Federation; Zeus Kerravala on The Meeting Room of the Future; and I'll be moderating a discussion on integrating Google Apps with UC.

You can see the full track agenda here, and you can get a deal on registration (25% off Total Access, 3-day Conference, 2-day Workshop and Cloud Connect Summit passes or a Free Expo pass) if you use our secret No Jitter code, BANOJITTER. I hope you can join us in New York.

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