There is never an end to the ongoing slew of vendor news and product announcements to keep up with. What does this mean? Innovation, of course! There isn't a day that goes by where I don't spend a few minutes at the end of the day to keep tabs on new products and offerings. As a systems integrator and architect, nothing can lower my blood pressure at the end of the workday other than discovering what new technologies are aimed at making my work life easier.

However, with this, comes volume. Now, we're concerned about market "over-saturation", where there are simply too many products and solutions for a single market. This poses an interesting question: Is The Convergence Market Over-Saturated?

And so we come back to a previous hot-button issue: appliances. To add fuel to the hot-bed of market activity, Aastra introduced the AastraLink Pro series of appliances to compete with the trixbox, Switchvox, etc, etc... Many view Aastra as a "small potatoes" vendor, yet their recent acquisition of Ericsson Enterprise Communication Solutions may prove otherwise.

The convergence market continues to be a waiting game. Would I put money on who's going to end up on top? Absolutely not!