They may have different ways of getting there, but everyone at last week’s Communications Developer conference agreed on the destination: unified communications.

“Communications is becoming open in a way that allows developers to connect communications to virtually anything from hardware to software to network equipment,” says conference producer TMC President Rich Tehrani. “Leaving the decision about what to implement to the purchaser.

“Virtually every company in the communications business will be offering APIs or some sort of developer program — that’s cast in stone. That’s going to allow all communications developers to connect communications to everything and anything — devices, business processes,” he continues. “Set-top boxes will become video conference hubs. It will just continue.”

As a result, software was the dominant interest area at this year’s conference, Tehrani reports, “driven by various XML languages and SIP. These are the things allowing developers to focus on software and abstract the hardware.”

While everyone agrees on where we’re going, there are two schools of thought about how to get there. If you sell phones, you integrate applications with the phone. If you sell software, you integrate communications with the desktop.

“You see the world through your own glasses,” is how Tehrani puts it. the dichotomy also reflects the ways people interact differently with devices and applications. For example, call center staff are used to interacting through the phone, so it makes sense to have the phone call initiate the transaction. Engineers, on the other hand, interact through their desktop, so it makes sense to have the application initiate the phone call.

Regardless of the model for working, everybody was promoting two things. First, that “unified communications is the ultimate business process enabler,” as Cisco vice president for advanced services Parvesh Sethi put it. And second, a development platform to implement it.

Cisco was showing its Unified Application Designer, an intuitive, graphical tool for building .Net communications applications based on Cisco Call Manager.

Everything is drag-and-drop or menu selection. Cisco development engineer Atul Trasi created a simple application for me in less than five minutes — and that included explaining the system to me.

Not quite as mind-numbingly easy was Avaya’s Voice Portal and Dialog Designer, but the interface was still graphical and building applications was also based on drag-and-drop. Avaya offers both APIs and SDKs as free downloads in addition to comprehensive resource for developers that include technical consulting and equipment discounts.

While some may say that Avaya’s century-long history in telecom leaves the company shackled to old school business and technology models, a huge installed base and long experience in the telecom trenches also gives the company an advantage in the larger marketplace.

Currently, Avaya is actively recruiting development partners, especially to develop vertical market products. One way market growth is going to come is by allowing applications developers to create new value for customers, according to Avaya Marketing Manager Joe Manzuella. “Moving people from traditional telephony to VoIP is not just about saving money,” he adds. “But to voice-enable communications to connect them to the full potential of VoIP.”

It’s beginning to feel like the 80s merger mania all over again.

This week Microsoft snapped up mobile search application company TellMe, and Cisco inked a $3.2 billion deal for Web conferencing pioneer WebEx.

inquiring minds want to know: what’s it all mean?

Voxeo VP Marketing John Hibel thinks that regardless of what else these acquisitions mean, they’re good news for his company’s voice applications platform.

“it’s a strong validation for Voxeo because we have a lot in common with the TellMe platform,” he explains. Likewise, WebEx aquisition spells good news for the future of voice integration into business and desktop applications.

Despite similarities between TellMe’s and Voxeo’ respective platforms, Hibel doesn’t see TellMe as a competitor. TellMe focuses on developing mobile search applications while Voxeo targets its platform to developers.

While Voxeo can be used to develop mobile search applications, Hibel doesn’t see that as a big play right now.

“TellMe generates zero mobile search revenue today,” he says. “Nobody’s generating mobile search revenue today. You have to look at this as a long term investment. If you look at the deal, you have to assume that no one is going to write a checkfor $800 million [for something with no current revenue] otherwise.”

Cisco and Apple have come to terms about the “iPhone” trademark. Under today’s agreement, both companies can use the “iPhone” trademark. Each acknowledges the trademark ownership rights that have been granted and will dismiss any pending actions over it. Tonight’s press release says that “Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications.” No other details were released.

At first it looked like it was all settled: The new Apple mobile phone product would be dubbed “iPhone” afterall, and Cisco, which owns the trademark to the name, was on board.

Not so fast.

A day after Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the company’s newest product line, and a day after Cisco officials announced they had been discussing the use of the name “iPhone” with Apple, Cisco has filed suit against Apple for trademark infringement.

“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name,” is how Mark Chandler, a Cisco senior vice president and general counsel, was quoted in a Cisco press release today. “There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.”

“Today’s iPhone is not tomorrow’s iPhone,” the release continues. “The potential for convergence of the home phone, cell phone, work phone and PC is limitless, which is why it is so important for us to protect our brand.”

Should businesses take an evolutionary approach to VoIP? Or should they bite the bullet and completely replace their existing TDM systems?

Sunnyvale, CA-based privately held ShoreTel, which has been selling IP-PBX systems for business for a decade, says ‘replace.’

ShoreTel VP of Marketing, Steve Timmerman, is blunt.

“The evolutionary approach is good for Avaya. It isn’t good for customers,” he says. “Nobody is investing in TDM anymore – it’s a dead end. The choice for customers is whether you want to go through the death by 1,000 cuts or make the leap once.”

A hybrid environment is complex to manage — Timmerman calls it a “nightmare” — and doesn’t scale. More important, a pure IP environment sets the stage for more efficient business operations and new customer services. “Cost savings isn’t the driver,” Timmerman explains. “The real benefit of pure IP is applying it to the business.”

ShoreTel has been in business for 10 years and was founded as an IP PBX company when few people were thinking about IP telephony besides VoIP pundit Jeff Pulver. Even as recently as 2002, the company hired an engineer from a traditional PBX company that pooh-poohed the idea of IP-PBX.

“He had proposed a voice over Ethernet system and they didn’t believe you could do that,” recalls ShoreTel founder Ed Basart.

Although it’s not as well known as competitor Cisco, ShoreTel has achieved rapid and steady growth — 366 percent over the past five years, according to Timmerman, and has been profitable for the past two. The company’s customers include the City of Oakland, CA and the staffing company, Robert Half International.

Infonetics, Infotech, and Deloitte & Touche rank ShoreTel as one of the fastest growing IP-PBX companies and it was named one of the Silicon Valley Fast 50 by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.

Timmerman acknowledges that lack of visibility is one of the company’s principal challenges. “We’re in only three of ten deals,” he says. “We’re competing with giants and we beat them on a regular basis.”

He ticks off the ways that ShoreTel’s PBX outpaces the competition.

The first is system architecture. ShoreTel’s PBX is designed more as an appliance rather than a system.

“We have a distributed switch-based architecture – there is no disk or hard drive,” Timmerman explains. “It runs on an embedded operating system - VxWorks.” With server intensive architectures, the design used by many PBX systems, the disk drive is the most likely point of failure. Without these “moving parts,” ShoreTel’s architecture delivers higher reliability, contends Timmerman.

Another benefit of this architecture is scalability. “You can scale from a few users to thousands with a single architecture,” Timmerman explains. “You just add an additional switch to the rack.”

In a comparison of system cost and complexity for Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and ShoreTel by the New York research firm Nemertes, ShoreTel took the first place for set-up ease: an average of 69 minutes. (Avaya was second at 77 minutes, Nortel next at 186 minutes and Cisco took last place with 250 minutes per user).

The second way that ShoreTel shines is ease of configuration, installation and management, according to Timmerman. “We have a one page price book – three switches, two gateways, five phones. You mix and match.”

And customers don’t have to worry about obsolescence. “The 1998 switch is still l supported by the current software,” he says.

ShoreTel comes with a Web browser-based system management application. “Other vendors still have a CLI [command line interface] to manage,” Timmerman explains. “That’s a nightmare. Other vendors have multiple interfaces. ShoreTel has a single image of all your offices. You can manage the entire systems with one view.”

The third competitive feature that Timmerman points to is the company’s ergonomic phones. “Our phones have a unique design. They have a concave surface – they’re easy to look at. Speakers and microphones are high quality.”

ShoreTel also provides a desktop personal call manager GUI. “We have people who never touch the phone,” Timmerman reports. The call manager also interfaces with Microsoft Outlook.

The company also has wireless integration in the pipeline. “We’re working on putting applications on a cell phone that make it look like a phone on the company IP-PBX,” says Timmerman.

But what does all this functionality cost? Here, too, ShoreTel gives competitors a run for their money. Capital, start-up and maintenance costs are a third to half those of other competitors, according to another Nemertes study.

At the same time, ShoreTel gets high marks from customers, receiving a number one ranking for customer service from the Nemertes survey.

“You don’t compete with giants unless you have a better system,” Timmerman observes.