Stage set for VoIP, patch debates

All the parties that have been called on to participate in two upcoming Network World Showdowns are in, including six prominent VoIP vendors for a Showdown at the VON conference in Boston this week, and six patch-management players for an online debate Nov. 15.

The VON event will be our fifth Showdown at the show over the years, as we've tracked the development of IP PBXs and the rise of IP Centrex services.

This time around Avaya, Cisco, Lucent, Mitel, Nortel and 3Com have agreed to come prepared to discuss a mock RFI for a company with a New York headquarters with 400 stations and five T-1 trunks, a branch office in Hoboken, N.J., with 10 stations, five analog lines and T-1 access, and a branch office in Bakersfield, Calif., with 10 stations, five analog lines and DSL.

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All the parties that have been called on to participate in two upcoming Network World Showdowns are in, including six prominent VoIP vendors for a Showdown at the VON conference in Boston this week, and six patch-management players for an online debate Nov. 15.

The VON event will be our fifth Showdown at the show over the years, as we've tracked the development of IP PBXs and the rise of IP Centrex services.

This time around Avaya, Cisco, Lucent, Mitel, Nortel and 3Com have agreed to come prepared to discuss a mock RFI for a company with a New York headquarters with 400 stations and five T-1 trunks, a branch office in Hoboken, N.J., with 10 stations, five analog lines and T-1 access, and a branch office in Bakersfield, Calif., with 10 stations, five analog lines and DSL.

We've told the vendors the buyer is primarily interested in the productivity gains it can expect and how the system will support emerging technologies such as Wi-Fi phones and the ability to take advantage of presence. Each company will have 5 minutes to walk us through an architecture slide and a benefits slide, before fielding questions from yours truly, VON's Carl Ford and one of the competitors.

That will be followed by a Showdown staple: the vendors questioning each other in round-robin fashion.

We'll detail the outcome in a Network World story and post the slides on www.nwfusion.com. Stay tuned.

The other pending Showdown is a virtual debate on patch management the week of Nov. 15.

With patch-management options emerging from three segments - pure play patch-management vendors, server and desktop management suppliers, and vendors that are coupling vulnerability scanning with patch management - we thought it would be good to bring representatives from each category together to see if we could ascertain which approach makes the most sense.

Accepting the challenge to participate are Altiris, Big Fix, Citadel, Configuresoft, Shavlik Technologies and Symantec.

We'll launch the online debate Nov. 15 with vendors' answers to questions from Network World Senior Editor John Fontana, Senior Writer Denise Dubie and guest expert Felicia Nicastro, a principal consultant with International Network Services and author of the forthcoming book Curing the Patch Management Headache. On Nov. 16 the vendors will be given the chance to question their competitors, and then on the following day we'll open the doors to everyone, including other vendors and readers.

I hope you can join us for these debates.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.