Communications Solutions 2000 Product Of The Year

January , 2001

The communications industry is growing at a record pace, with each new announcement contributing to a montage, increasing the complexity, depth, and worth. In this section we recognize the most significant contributions during the year 2000.

When we assemble an awards feature as sweeping as the Products Of The Year, we accept a task akin to creating a single, panoramic view from a pile of snapshots. While each snapshot may seem almost whimsically particular, focusing on one detail or another, the photos, in aggregate, must yield something approaching a unified view. And so each product we cite is a single view contributing to the whole, however disjointed or distorted that whole may first appear.

While an aggregate view, a montage, may admit both discontinuities and redundancies, it may also deliver the compensating qualities of liveliness and immediacy, for it mimics the way eyes traverse a scene, and the way the mind shuffles and arranges a multitude of discreet impressions into a single image.

The impressions we have shuffled and arranged were gathered over the course of the previous year, in briefings at trade shows, in discussions during on-site visits, in interviews supplementing our research for other articles, in hands-on tests, and, finally, in our review of formal applications. These impressions traverse the communications solutions space, from enabling technologies and development platforms, to enterprise and customer interaction systems, to next-generation public infrastructure.

Together, these impressions resolve into a weirdly fractured but nonetheless coherent whole, which is, perhaps, appropriate to field as sweeping as converged communications. No single tunnel-visioned glimpse would suffice. And yet, no eye can see everywhere at once. The compromise, then, is to shift and nudge together the sometimes -- overlapping glimpses, unifying a universe of particulars, delivering a "mind's eye" view of convergence as reliable -- and as problematic -- as memory itself.

And so, without further ado, we present a picture of the year, as constituted by the year's most memorable and significant releases, that is, the year's most interesting new products (which by no means omits significant upgrades to existing products). We present the Communications Solutions? Products Of The Year 2000.