Network World's IT Roadmap conference in Boston last week opened with an analyst roundtable discussion that provided a series of quips about the current thinking on everything from mobility to VoIP and e-discovery.

Asked if we are any closer to being able to carry a single mobile device, Craig Mathias, principal of the Farpoint Group, pulled two out of his pockets and said neither one is perfect. "One has a big screen and the other has a good keypad. One is better at voice, the other better at data. It's what we call the single-device paradox." And no, he said, they won't be meshed anytime soon.

The Network World representatives then turned the conversation to network management, asking if we're getting better at it.

"Fault management for routers? We don't worry about that kind of stuff too much anymore," said Jim Metzler, president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates. But we're not good at management that transcends resources, he said. Application service delivery, where you have to take into account the health of everything between the client and the application, we stink at managing that."

Andreas Antonopoulos, senior vice president and founding partner of Nemertes Research, said integration of management systems is still an issue. "If you're walking down a street and see a building on fire you don't dial 911 for a chemical fire, 912 for a wood fire. We need to integrate systems to simplify their use."

Asked to give us a sense of where we stand on VoIP, Johna Till Johnson, president and senior founding partner of Nemertes, made a dire prediction: "You are going to get blindsided by desktop VoIP."

With Microsoft building VoIP into its productivity suite, companies need to decide whether VoIP is a desktop application or not, Johnson said. "I know one company that has desktop collaborative VoIP on the agenda for '07, and [infrastructure] VoIP slated for '08. They'll have VoIP but no strategy for managing it. The back-end solution is much more complex than Microsoft understands."

On the topic of e-discovery, Antonopoulos said "companies are gaining lots of experience by being sued all the time." The big problem with e-discovery isn't retention, he said, but knowing when you can destroy information and actually getting that done. "It is still more about process than technology."