This is a whole different class of event from IPExpo. The speakers all actually seems to want to be there, knew their subjects, were passionate about them and, very oddly as they were almost all American, hardly used any of that terrible "American Management Speak". Nobody spoke of empowering, levering or even best practices. The Best - A presentation by John Malone (President and CEO of Eastern Management Group) on their recent study into the effect of Open Source on the PBX market. Which leads to the conclusion that as Open Source now has an 18% share of the US PBX market and has grown 40% over 2007-08, while "traditional" PBX manufacturers had stagnated, a major shift is happening. This is largely being ignored by the established manufacturer while they collectively stuck their heads in the sand. The Worst - IBM and their Smart Business Cube Server. They really still do think the world revolves around them. That they can say what the customer wants rather than trouble the customer to find out. The Cube is horribly complicated to configure for a non-IT user who will have no idea what applications to load on it and no idea how to config TCP/IP settings for Asterisk. To say "your end users will just come here {web site on the Cube}, download the client software and install it" just sums it up.

Overall 4 1/2 out of 5.