At the Fall ’25 vCon conference in Washington, D.C., Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, sat down with Dan Petrie, CEO & President of SIPez, to talk about the origins, purpose, and practical future of vCon technology. Petrie, who co-authored the original vCon draft and brought it to the IETF in 2003, describes vCon as a “standard container for capturing conversations” across voice, video, messaging, email, web chat, and more—bringing structure and consistency to interaction data that has long been fragmented across proprietary platforms.

Drawing an analogy to Adobe’s breakthrough with PDF, Petrie explains that just as PDF standardized how documents are represented and shared regardless of word processor or device, vCon does the same for conversational data. By abstracting common elements like parties, metadata, transcripts, and even AI-generated analytics into a unified format, vCons allow enterprises to capture, store, and analyze interactions from call centers, UCaaS platforms, and messaging systems in a consistent way. This unlocks deeper analysis—such as customer sentiment, agent performance, product feedback, and workflow optimization—without having to wrestle with dozens of incompatible APIs.

Petrie stresses that vCon is especially valuable in an AI-driven world, where structured, well-labeled data is essential. “To get real value from AI, you need structured data,” he notes, pointing out that large language models like ChatGPT can only work on limited context windows and rely on upstream systems to extract, segment, and feed the right portions of conversation data. vCons provide that layer: a rich, extensible container that supports encryption, signing, redaction, amendments, and complex scenarios such as multi-leg call transfers and agent handoffs.

Much of Petrie’s advice is practical: don’t try to build everything from scratch. SIPez maintains open-source vCon projects (such as PyvCon) and also offers a commercial vCon recording and AI analysis solution for the NetSapiens platform, giving service providers and MSPs a faster on-ramp. As more vendors add vCon interfaces and as small and mid-sized providers adopt these tools, Petrie believes 2026 will be a pivotal year for MSPs and channel partners to start monetizing vCon-based analytics and services across horizontal markets—from healthcare to customer support and beyond.

To learn more about SIPez’s vCon tools, open-source projects, and consulting services, visit http://sipez.com/.