When we asked our experts which technologies CIOs should be payingattention to, they all agreed on one: convergence of voice, data andultimately video on one IP-based network. Not that it takes aclairvoyant to see this - the industry hype machine has been ballyhooingIP convergence for years. But now the hype is starting to take on moresubstance.

Ian Angus, of Angus TeleManagement Group, Ajax, Ont., has been an IPconvergence sceptic, but today he says it is "potentially the biggestshift in how we do communications since the move in the 1980s fromdumb terminals to PCs and networks."

The big payoffs will come, he believes, from applications that mergedata and voice functionality. One example is a hotel system thatallows guests to order from room service by pressing buttons to selectfrom menus on their telephone's screen.Another is an inbound sales system that automatically loads acustomer's record onto a PC screen when a call comes in.

"None of these are things that you can't do without IP," he stresses."It's just that IP makes it affordable and relatively easy to do."

Mark Quigley, director of research at Yankee Group, also sees IP voicebreaking through soon. "We've been talking about it for years," hepoints out. "But now we're finally getting to the point where IPnetworks are able to provide the service levels needed - the vauntedfive nines of reliability [99.999 per cent up time]. And now we canstart to see the cost savings and potential increases in internalefficiency and productivity."