The Telecoms industry has been dominated by closed and proprietary telecom players for too long and a "new breed" of telecom technology providers - namely the largest IT/Software players - are jumping in with both feet now to give a viable alternative.

Reason - drives more chips, lucky Intel !, more servers and ISV applications. Benefits for the customer is that they have further choice, a fairly open system that talks to other areas of their business. This means more relevant business applications are joining the "solution" instead of having to muddle through with what was bundled on their closed systems.

The differences I am seeing now are in the market, who are the dominant voices driving the change? It is not the small ISV's striving by themselves anymore, they now have the ability to ride off the back of the giant providers.

The biggest winner in my view will be the customer with the ability to have resilient systems, great 3rd party apps and a range of options at competitive rates. I would not want to be an Avaya, Mitel or Alcatel sales person in the next couple of years!