Virtual communication on the way

Karyn Mashima began her talk about real virtuality and its effect on the future of communication with a virtual picture of her face, eyes rolling eerily around the room as a voice-over introduced her.

The techie entrance was fitting for Mashima's topic, "Real Virtuality-How the Next Generation of Enterprise Networks will Change the Way We Communicate." Mashima, vice president of advanced multimedia communications for Lucent Technologies, gave one of two keynote speeches sponsored by CommUnity, joining the recent Networld+Interop show for the first time.

"I'd like to thank Softbankforums for recognizing that we as an industry will never be able to be neatly compartmentalized into data, voice and video again,' Mashima said.

According to Mashima, three factors will drive the future of enterprise networks that transparently blend voice, video and data: customer needs and expectations, the business profitability model and changing technology.

Customers simply expect more information at their fingertips, and quickly, explained Mashima. To compete, businesses must respond creatively, but doing so requires making the right choices, she said.

"Where [should you] make investments-at the end points, in management, in the infrastructure?' Mashima asked. "Where should you put advertising dollars? On the Web, on television or in print? Successful players will meet the customer's expectations of response time with security.'

Video segments accompanied Mashima's discussion of technological breakthroughs. Lucent employees were shown demonstrating Web browsers that are activated only by voice, 360 degrees digital cameras and virtual environments created on computer.

"Customers, students and researchers can get the most out of a browser that can understand and respond to spoken requests in several languages," Mashima said. "It takes a lot of processing power to do it, but we want to go in the direction of bringing technology to people rather than people to technology.'