It�s d�j� vu all over again!

Yours Truly pleaded with Greg Galitzine not to take that �Bermuda Triangle Celebrity Cruise� but he just wouldn�t listen. . . .

Just kidding. Greg is still with us � indeed, his �The VoIP Authority� column now serves as the Grand Finale to each issue of this magazine. Greg has been promoted to Group Editorial Director for the IP Communications Group here at TMC. While occasionally looking over my shoulder and monitoring the progress of Internet Telephony, IMS and SIP magazines, he�ll also now be immersed in producing and editing content for TMCnet, the communications industry�s most successful news Web site.

As for Yours Truly, I was the founding editor of Jeff Pulver�s VON Magazine. Some readers out there may also remember my long association with Harry Newton and Computer Telephony magazine, which was renamed Communications Convergence (News - Alert) after CMP bought Newton�s company in 1997 for $130 million.

Having taken upon myself the heavy mantle of Greg Galitzine�s former Executive Editor role, I now find myself in charge of three amazingly dynamic and illustrious magazines. Back in the heyday of the 1990s I�d be calling them �sizzling and exploding� magazines. And you know what? They are!

When I left my previous job, I wrote my colleagues the following paragraphs. They never saw print. But although they were written by an editor saying goodbye to his fellow editors and readers, I think you�ll agree that, ironically, they apply equally to an editor saying hello to his new staff and readers as they all embark on a new publishing adventure. . .

A friend-of-a-friend of mine, the late, great, literary agent Paul R. Reynolds, once noted that, �The Reader�s Digest has had the same editor for the past 20 years and I bet you can�t name him.�

He was right � I couldn�t. But then, a great editor is never a famous, overpowering, or dictatorial presence, but more of a guide and colleague, primus inter pares or first among equals. So it�s not surprising if an editor becomes �the ghost in the machine,� since the machine � or magazine in this case � is really the business end of things as far as the reader is concerned. Besides, a magazine is a group effort and is only as good as its whole team. Unfortunately, whole teams of talent � even great talent � can similarly be taken for granted and then forgotten over time. To this day we continue to be entertained by the works of, say, Gilbert & Sullivan, but how many of us know of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, or Henri Meilhac and L�on Hal�vy, or the Goncourt brothers? A ludicrous comparison, perhaps. After all, our job is not to impress literary critics or delight theater audiences for ages to come; rather, we have the far more humble and ephemeral task of providing corporate decision makers with the information they need to transition their enterprises and networks to IP communications.

But surely our workmanlike efforts in helping to bring about this epic technological change on a global scale can be as ennobling and as important historically as any grandiose work of letters, perhaps more so. And if someone in the future fondly remembers that Yours Truly and his associates had something to do with it all, so much the better.

. . .Now that we�re past the highfalutin, reach-for-a-hanky stuff, let�s get down to business. Internet Telephony magazine is the largest and most successful IP communications magazine in the world. It literally grows in size and circulation every day. And it is backed by the most sophisticated and highest-ranked Web site of its kind, www.tmcnet.com. I strongly feel that you�ll both enjoy and find useful the immense, timely mass of information bursting forth from TMC�s magazines and online resources.

As we went to press, news came over the wire that Eicon has purchased the remaining Dialogic (News - Alert) assets from Intel and is changing its name to � Dialogic! (See Rich Tehrani�s article on this elsewhere in this issue.) Dialogic, the bellwether company of the 1990s computer telephony era, is back. Hmm. Yours Truly is back and Dialogic is back. Could Howard Bubb (Dialogic�s former CEO), Marc Ostrofsky (of Voice expo fame) and Harry Newton be far behind? Gasp! IT