en Passant

I just spent a very interesting lunch with a friend and former manager. I tend to trust his insight as he is the same guy who gave me my break in the local market when I was still a college student. As a long time IT professional, he has experienced the ups and downs of the market that I have (thankfully) managed to avoid, until lately. While catching up on old times, we discussed future trends in the industry.

His advice?? VOIP, or more specifically Cisco Call Manager. Whereas, Microsoft products on the other hand are starting to get old-hat. Anybody with a bit of computer background can download and install Windows, Exchange and MS SQL server. Trial versions exist that can be located by anyone with a broadband connection. Unfortunately, this only makes marketing my 12+ years of experience has become virtually impossible against these overnight professionals.

Why? Voice Over IP is in it's nascent stages right now, with room for enormous growth. More and more companies are starting to see the advantages of using their existing data infrastructure to place voice calls. These advantages include:

• Using an already existing infrastructure. The company is already paying for high-speed Internet connectivity. VOIP simply rides ontop this stable network infrastructure.
• Multiple locations can communicate seemlessly and avoid long distance phone charges.
• Roaming phone numbers. A phone is assigned to a person, not a location. That person moves to a new office, new location or even goes home, the phone number can follow seemlessly. Simply plug it into the network and instantly have phone access.
• Instantly add new services. Want to add a new phone number? Click a button. Want to change the 911 service? Modify the user's profile. This means that the control is returned to the company. No longer do they need to request services, schedule the change and waste costly time making these modifications. All changes can be done through a single user interface.

Where to start? I am now looking into getting my CCNA. Checking the Cisco site, I see that if I work hard, I can successfully get it with only a single test. At the moment, I am not quite sure what this may entail, but I believe it includes a series of mulitple-choice questions and a 'practical'.

Gotta go, learning the 7 layers of the OSI model. "All People Seem To Need Data Processing."