Lots of talk at Interop 2007 about voice, data, and combining the two. The phrase "unified communications" is being tossed about more often than acrobats in a Cirque du Soleil show. Avaya announced their new Avaya Distributed Office system, a fully-IP communications system for branch offices - it focuses on high integration, easy rollout, and small TCO with the goal of networking employees across all branches of Lots of talk at Interop 2007 about voice, data, and combining the two. The phrase “unified communications” is being tossed about more often than acrobats in a Cirque du Soleil show. Avaya announced their new Avaya Distributed Office system, a fully-IP communications system for branch offices – it focuses on high integration, easy rollout, and small TCO with the goal of networking employees across all branches of a company, said Carl Baptiste, Avaya’s vice president of converged products. The Avaya Distributed Office i40 and Avaya Distributed Office i120 hardware can be pre-configured to match a company’s preferences, and a wizard walks through on-site configuration. It then links up with the central management software to take care of call routing. While the Distributed Office system is aimed at branch offices, it sure sounds to me like it wouldn’t take too much to turn it into an SMB-style telephony package…InfiniBand poised for growth: A new report from IDC forecasts high demand for InfiniBand (IB) as it works its way out of high-performance computing (HPC) environments and into the enterprise. Worldwide IB host channel adaptor (HCA) factory revenues are expected to grow from $62.3 million in 2006 to $224.7 million in 2011, with IB switch port sales expected to grow from $94.9 million in 2006 to $612.2 million in 2011. Demand from datacenter and database environments, virtualization, and the high-transaction and compliance needs of certain verticals (financial companies, health care) are bringing IB into the enterprise – but as a complement to existing FC and Ethernet, according to the Infiniband Trade Association.Burn, baby, burn: Word has it that the folks from ioSafe – they make “disaster-proof” backup and storage devices – took a couple of their boxes out to a distant parking lot last night and set ’em on fire to show just how disaster-proof they really are (don’t worry, it was a pre-planned event with plenty of security measures taken). I still say they should have tossed a few of their products into the Mirage’s volcano… Technology Industry