Unified Communications 2009 took place in London On March 11 and March 12.  It was a well-attended buzzing event.  As with many of these gatherings though it seemed like there were more vendors present than money paying customers.  Of the vendors, Nortel had probably the largest presence in terms of booth size -- no doubt a show of strength in these troubled times but more likely that this event had been planned a long time ago and the money already spent. Not to be outdone by Nortel, Cisco had no less than three stands: one showing Cisco's collaboration with BT, one representing SMB (formerly Cisco Linksys) and the other their mobile showcase. 

Along side the exhibition were four tracks of seminars -- free and mainly very well attended -- depending on speaker attraction and topic -- probably each seminar room holding about 50 people with an overflow area for the casual interested passerby.  Although the seminar tracks were named differently there was so much overlap that it was hard, for example, to separate the VoIP track from the Unified Messaging track -- many of the speakers reiterating the same points.  Many speakers focussed on the definition of Unified Communications whereas others such as NEC Philips gave us more a vision of the future taking Unified Communications towards a Unified Business where business applications are integrated alongside the audio and video aspects of communication -- even beyond Contact Centers where this is already happening.