NEW YORK – As the data networking world gathers this week, IT professionals identified the reality that spending on infrastructure management to build intelligent networks has taken priority over applications like voice over IP.

 

There is still a good bit of evidence that shows infrastructure spending is a disproportionate amount of the IT budget “even though we're the ones that sell the hammers and think everything is the nail,” acknowledged Scott Kriens, Chairman and CEO of Juniper Networks (News - Alert).

 

In his keynote address to kick off the Interop New York trade show entitled “Putting the ‘Real’ in the Real-Time Enterprise,” Kriens spoke frankly to networking professionals telling them to tone down the hype with marketing rhetoric like “best-in-class” or “next-generation,” adding that vendors have certain responsibilities to buyers.

 

“Let's do away with the PowerPoint promises,” he declared.

 

But while conference attendees applauded his candor, the central themes of security and manageability seemed to contradict the notion that voice continues to be just another application within the network. For example, at a separate VoIP Security session, Gary Audin, president of Delphi Inc., explained that “best practices” deployments dictate both VoIP firewalls and corporate firewalls run in parallel in order to mitigate risks and meet compliance requirements.

 

“Most firewalls are not application machines. They are networking machines. Voice is an application,” Audin said.

 

In fact, his fellow panelist, Gregory Lebovitz, technical director and solutions architect at Juniper, indicated that certain call functions such as session management actually should be incorporated into the network through elements like routers and firewalls. The comments made by Lebovitz, who was a member of Juniper’s due diligence team that evaluated the Kagoor acquisition, seemed to indicate why Juniper made its decision to kill off Kagoor after the acquisition.

 

“Today the VF series [formerly of Kagoor] is a standalone product. In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense to have application layer proxies for VoIP applications on things that are at the public facing points of the network,” Lebovitz told TMCnet.

 

To be sure, even though conference attendees overwhelming represented the data side of network convergence, long-time carrier players like Sprint (News - Alert) welcomed the chance to educate a potentially new user base.

 

“A lot of people are here to learn. We're trying to get that message out,” Barry Tishgart, director of product marketing for Sprint, said in announcing its new Sprint Mobile Security suite.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.