When I look at the press releases and phone calls that have come my way ahead of the Interop show, two phrases leap out: Unified Communications, and Network Access Control (NAC). It's not that there won't be anything else here at the show, but both of these areas seem to be gaining a lot of momentum heading into the rest of 2008. Unified communications have been "the next big thing" for several years n When I look at the press releases and phone calls that have come my way ahead of the Interop show, two phrases leap out: Unified Communications, and Network Access Control (NAC). It’s not that there won’t be anything else here at the show, but both of these areas seem to be gaining a lot of momentum heading into the rest of 2008.Unified communications have been “the next big thing” for several years now. After several years of great promise and little implementation, it’s easy to get jaded about new announcements compared to what’s actually going to happen. This time, though, I think we may actually be getting close. The first big step in my move to this opinion was Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. I’m not willing to say that it’s the ultimate communication package (it’s not), but it is positioned to help a lot of companies move in the direction of unified communications. Like the oft-referenced rising tide, it is helping to float a lot of UC boats in the market, and many of those boats have pulled into Interop. I’ll plan to have more on UC announcements as the show goes on.The other buzz phrase for the show is NAC. Now, it’s important to note that we’re not just talking about Cisco’s brand of network access control. This year, it seems like every vendor has some flavor of access control that they’re talking about. Some of them are focusing on ensuring that devices attaching to the network meet organizational policy requirements (the gist of the Cisco approach), while others are tying device policy enforcement with user account control for a single-device approach to making sure your network is secure. This kind of NAC is coming on fast, and is the sort of thing that’s going to be of interest to small businesses. Security is one of the principal areas in which we’re seeing vendors admit that small businesses have the same type (if not scale) of need seen by larger enterprises. I’ll be blogging from Interop through Wednesday — if you want to keep up with the posts, keep checking back here or go to Twitter and follow iw_smb_it. It will let you know whenever there’s a new SMB IT blog post, or if I just something truly cool at the show. Technology Industry