Just got back from the Open Telephony Training seminar in Las Vegas.

I found it to be a very worthwhile.  Not just for the training (which was very good) but also to network with some of the movers and shakers in the community.  A somewhat unexpected surprise was all the free stuff handed out.  I'm not just talking t-shirts and pens.  Everyone got an Aastra 55i phone and 1 Gig flash drive loaded up with Aastra documentation and an offer for significantly discounted rates on a reseller bundle of Aastra phones.  Some other things everyone got were an iSymphony Conduction Edition software license and a LumenVox license.  Digium hinted that all participants will be getting something in the mail that we should be "very happy about".  I also managed to win a raffle for one of two Edgewater EdgeMarc 4500 VoIP Routers.  So just in terms of vendor contributions I was very impressed.  I had to get a cardboard box to bring back all the free stuff I got as there wasn't nearly enough room in my luggage.

As far as 3rd party participants there were representatives from:
Digium
Aastra
Sangoma
Pika Technologies
Edgewater
LumenVox
i9 Technologies
? (hope I didn't leave anyone out)

They even had Allison Smith (the voice of Asterisk) come in and give a talk!  Everyone seemed to get a kick out of some of her more kooky IVR projects.

Special mention goes out to Schmoozecom.  One of the main organizers of the event.  They made some great XML scripts available to all participants.  I'm not sure if those will be made publicly available or not.

All the vendors either gave away free products or participated in a silent auction where people got some amazing deals.  For example, a Redfone quad port T1 Bridge with an MSRP of around $1700 supposedly went for about $600.  There were T1 and analog cards from Sangoma, Pika, and Digium that went for half the MSRP (or less!) as far as I could tell.

I'll be writing more about some of the technical things I learned later.  For now I just want to say that I met some great people and got a pretty good feel for what some people in the community are doing and where things are heading.  There were even hints of some major announcements forthcoming shortly.  That is about all I should say about that for now.

Probably the biggest thing I came away with is that we are not in competition with each other. The real competition is with the traditional telco vendors selling solutions from Cisco, Avaya, Shoretel, Panasonic, Samsung etc. which consititutes something like 99% of the market.