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Look For Mobility To Be Big Next Week At Interop

I am packing my bags for Interop Las Vegas next week. I expect to hear vendors talk more about mobility at next week's show. I think smartphones and other wireless gadgets will soon become central to enterprise telephony.

For starters, it looks like John Chambers at Cisco is going to talk about mobile. And as everyone knows, as Chambers goes, so goes the show:

Keynote: John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems(CSCO) -- Chambers will be delivering the keynote on Tuesday morning. "He really does a great job every year of setting the tone for the event and for the industry and for setting out the course of things to come," said Heymann. "He talked quite a bit last year about video and collaboration. And, in fact, in the last 12 month, those have been really very key technologies that have risen to the top of the list for business technology users. This year he'll be talking at least some about mobility."

I think that's what they call a clue.

In the bigger picture, I have noticed a trend in the last year where IP PBX vendors like Cisco, Avaya, and others have started talking about mobility. I suspect that over the next two years mobility will become more tightly integrated into existing telephony technologies. It only makes sense, right? Why not tie your employees' BlackBerry smartphones into the corporate phone system?

I also think Enterprise 2.0 is going to follow the lead of its Web-parent, Web 2.0, and start looking for more mobile connections. If Web 2.0's mobile offspring is Mobile 2.0, then I guess Enterprise 2.0's child will be Mobile Enterprise 2.0, the blending of Mobile 2.0 technologies (widgets on cell phones, presence, and location) with Enterprise 2.0 systems.

How much of this will we see next week at Interop? I am not sure, but I suspect we'll see the beginnings of the convergence (telecom pun intended) of IP telephony, Enterprise 2.0, and mobility.

What do you think? Do you any of expect to hear more about mobility at next week's Interop?

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