Eric Shepcaro, vice president of business and consumer strategy and development for AT&T (News - Alert) Inc., gave a keynote speech entitled “The Age of Convergence (News - Alert) and Collaboration” on Thursday, Oct. 12, during INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo, WEST, currently underway at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, Calif.

“From our perspective, convergence is real, it’s happening,” Shepcaro told the crowd that had gathered to hear his keynote during the third day of the well-attended conference. “There are actually applications that are being deployed. Customers are embracing convergence and collaboration. We’ve heard about converged devices and converged networks. I was hoping to talk to you this morning about ‘converged companies’ such as AT&T and Bell South, but unfortunately, the FCC (News - Alert) put off their vote by a day.”

The latter comment drew some laughter from the audience, which was comprised of a broad spectrum of professionals working in the realm of IP Communications.

“Meaningful convergence is pretty simple,” Shepcaro said. “It’s basically what you’ve all heard: Anytime, anywhere, collaboration, using any device. The we at AT&T look at it, you can no longer separate out the access silo, the network silo, or even the compute and IT silo. It is no longer possible because you need to think about how that application and how that content is going to ride over the infrastructure and support many different types of device, whether it be my IPTV (News - Alert), my television at home, my wireless device, my desktop, laptop, and so forth. So, really it’s really simple.”

“But what’s driving this? Why are all the pieces finally coming together?” Shepcaro asked rhetorically. “You can see some of the stats out there. Clearly, we’re excited about what we’re seeing with broadband penetration, particularly in rural areas where people have not been able to get broadband before, by using satellite and soon WiMAX technologies and other wireless technologies. Then there’s Voice over IP, which we’ve spoken about at these conferences over the past few years, and you can see that over half of the larger businesses have adopted VoIP in their operations today.”

“These technologies are interesting,” he said, “but really I think in terms of key drivers, one should look at ‘the millenials.’ Millenials are people who were born after 1982. If you think about them as I think about my son, and ourselves and all the ‘multitasking’, social networking, and involvement with the MySpace’s and YouTube’s of the world, and then consider that at the same time they have to do their work, or their homework in the case of my son, it’s really interesting how these millenials are going to be coming into the workforce and how all of this technology must support them. So really, it’s not just the technology, it’s the lifestyle.”

“Instant messaging, or IM is also interesting,” Shepcaro said. “I see by a show of hands that about half of the audience is allowed to use corporate IM, which is more than I expected. We’re obviously been seeing a lot of issues about IM played out in the Press over the last couple of weeks. We should all think about whether IM is secure enough and how we can protect IMs, and the phenomenon of federation of IM across the supply chains.”

“The average consumer home has more technology in it today than the average small business had five years ago,” he continued. “Our job at AT&T as a service provider is to simplify this universe for the consumers. Yes, it’s great to give them 25 megabits per second or more of bandwidth into consumers’ homes so they can get VoIP, IPTV and other services, but our job is to integrate all of these. So, from a converged environment, consumers can now deal with a single, simple user interface that controls all of these devices, whether it involves displaying their telephone messages on their TV set, or whatever. That’s what we’re focusing on at AT&T. Making it simple, taking the complexity out, but really driving the digital lifestyle, because it’s here and it’s not going away.’

“On the business side, it really is a new world of needs,” Shepcaro said. “Technologies are interesting too. There’s multimode devices, seamless mobility, and fixed mobile convergence are all interesting, as is what the business customers, CEOs and CIOs are saying. For example, I have some stats from a recent survey at AT&T just conducted, where we interviewed thousands of CEOs and CIOs during 2005 and 2006. We asked them ‘How important is network convergence to achieve your organizational, strategic IT and business goals.’ In 2005 only 45 percent thought it was important. In 2006, however, 89 percent said it was critical and important. That excites me because the CEOs and CIOs realize that to drive productivity and their strategic business goals, it’s not just about cost reduction using VoIP, it’s now about using convergence as a business initiative.”

“Another question we asked the CEOs and CIOs is ‘How widely will IP convergence be implemented in your business in three years?’” Shepcaro said. “In 2005, 62 percent said it would, and in 2006, 78 percent said it would. Once again, a significant difference. When we asked them what barriers they encounter, they said that network security is their number one impediment to adopting convergence, and in particular security in a VoIP and mobility environment.”

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Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC, he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine (later called Communications Convergence) from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.