I had a great dicussion with my bank manager the other day- wen't something like:

CA: I need to be able to see the statment of account for my on call forex electronically via internet banking.

BM: We can't do that- you should use desk bank, our $30+ a month 'business' product.

CA: Hmmm... that feels like daylight robery... but do tell me more. Does it work over the internet.

BM: Well, sort of, you use a modem to dial into it.

CA: WTF!?! I thought modems went out long ago. I don't even have a phone line.

And so it is. We do not have analog telephone lines at all in Wellington. At the office we have a VOIP PABX (an Asterisk Linux Box) and attached to this we have some SIP phones. At home I am getting TelstraClear cable turned on (they now let you have the internet without a phoneline which is a darn lot better than Telecom) and we'll setup a VPN tunnel to the office and attach a SIP phone off the PABX at home too. We already have a great VPN tunnel; running between our ISA servers in Dunedin and Wellington and we are going to put an Asterisk box at the Dunedin end so that we can VOIP out onto the University or Otago phone network- we have a number of on campus customers. We are alos doing A LOT of Skype calling- several of our customers now use it as their primary communication mechanism with us- we can have multi party phone conferences, for 90 minutes, for FREE!

We're also really taking advantage of MSN Messenger a heap more now. We use the Remote Assistance feature for pairs based programming at a distance.

Other cool things that we are doing include using MS Virtual Server to run a number of our key servers- the real benefit for us is the ability to scale up more easily without doing a full rebuild each time. Just pick up the required server images and drop them on a new box.

So a lot of this stuff really excites me at the moment. I'm talking with a number of customers and friends about how this can help their business too. Finally we're looking at some new business opportunities that take advantage of all this stuff.

Exciting times ahead.