Jamie Libow, telecommunications director at St. Paul Travelers Insurance in St. Paul, Minn., has already been using both Avaya and Cisco products in a combined IP telephony system for communications. The company, which has 30,000 employees, started with the combined Cisco-Avaya system in 2000 and will continue using it indefinitely. "Both have strengths, and both have weaknesses," Libow said in a keynote address. "No IP telephony system is perfect today, and that's why we have both Avaya and Cisco."

However, Libow joked that it is sometimes hard working with both companies as they compete, and he compared the experience to that of a child of divorced parents.

At a luncheon with analysts and reporters, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that SIP and other open standards are naturally going to push vendors closer together. But he also said that customers who buy an all-Cisco architecture will probably save more money than those who build hybrid systems. "The markets will come together for all forms of communication," he said.

The change in the market toward unified communications means that Cisco will be selling products not only to IT shops, but also to end users and consumers, Chambers said. Even as voice, data and video are converging, so, too, are security systems -- as shown by Cisco's announcement today that it plans to purchase SyPixx Networks Inc.

Don Proctor, senior vice president of the voice technology group, which oversees the Cisco Unified Communications system that was announced this week, said that 47 products make up the entire system, with about 15 of them new, including the Cisco Unified Presence Server. Cisco annnounced a new pricing model to allow customers to buy parts or all of that system, with the per-user costs ranging from US$450 to $1,500.