As attendees at last week's Consumer Electronics Show perused gadgets that could enhance their leisure time, their bosses were plotting to get them out of the office for good.

Members of a panel that delved into the world of technologies for home use said businesses are increasingly eyeing products that will enable employees to telecommute, or work from home.

"We're seeing a huge trend in the business world to move consumers away from commutes," said Alexander Ramia, director of product development for Innofone, an Internet consulting company in Santa Monica, Calif. "The person working at home doesn't know when to quit, so companies get more work out of them, and time spent in cars commuting is lost productivity."

The problem, Ramia said, is how to securely connect home offices to headquarters and other in-home workers.

The solutions the panelists discussed mostly revolved around the next generation of Internet technology, called Internet Protocol Version 6.

The present incarnation, Internet Protocol Version 4, is more than 30 years old, and its number of available addresses is approaching its limit. Experts said Version 6 will offer trillions of available addresses, so technologies ranging from cell phones to videoconference ports can each have their own Net address. That, in turn, enables secure point-to-point communication, without the need to route e-mails, instant messages, phone calls and files through servers. As a result, companies using Version 6 technologies will be able to guarantee communications came from an employee's machine at home. Doing away with servers should also make for faster and cleaner transmission of video and voice communications.

"(Internet Protocol Version 6) is the great enabler we've been waiting for," Ramia said.

Added panelist Mark Bayliss, president of telecommunications consultant Visual Link in Winchester, Va.: "If a company wants thousands of employees to work from home, it will be more cost- effective (than with previous technologies)."

Home-office gadgets running on Version 4 will continue to work as Version 6 technologies trickle onto the market.

One significant Version 6 debut will come this fall, when Microsoft launches its Windows Vista operating system.

Sinead O'Donovan, product unit manager in Microsoft's Windows Networking division, said all of the system's elements, from its Internet browser to its file-sharing and media-player platforms, are "Version 6 only." The easy transferability of communications via the new protocol will allow quick remote access to files and folders on home computers, O'Donovan said. That will translate into better mobility for home-office workers, as they're no longer confined to a single computer containing all their work. The improved security of Version 6 also spurred Microsoft developers to focus on using the new protocol in Vista.

Tech companies aren't sticking with computer software alone to make working at home easier.

Panelist Luan Dang, vice chairman of Caneum, a Newport Beach, Calif., company that provides outsourcing technologies, said voice over-Internet protocol is also liberating businesspeople who want to work at home.

With voice over Internet protocol, workers make phone calls using a broadband Internet connection rather than the conventional analog phone line.

Consumers using the technology for personal purposes -already enjoy one key benefit: lower long-distance expenses.

But Dang said those who work from home can take advantage of a host of additional attributes. They can have a local phone number in every city in America to serve far-flung customers, for example. If they leave the house, bringing their laptop along will let these workers make calls using their home-office phone number for caller-identification purposes.

"It lets home-office workers be more productive," Dang said.

Ramia pointed to another advantage of voice over Internet protocol: It doesn't drop conversations the way cell phones do. This can help businesspeople working at home sound a little more professional.

Dang added that future technologies for home offices will include Version 6-compatible videoconferencing products that deliver a smoother presentation than their current counterparts. And because every videoconferencing portal will have its own Internet address under Version 6, workers outside corporate offices can hop online and conduct their videoconference anywhere in the world -- from home, for example, or at a kiosk in an Internet cafè.

Dang also sees a future for technologies that integrate functions of business and leisure, such as a TiVo box that both records TV shows and runs stock tickers.

Panelists said the coming wave of business technologies designed around Internet Protocol Version 6 could hasten the working world's transformation into a telecommuter-based environment.

"We're moving as a mobile society to where we need constant communication," Ramia said. "Businesses can save billions in commuting losses by having the secure ability to communicate end to end. They can take advantage of tax incentives to encourage home offices, and they can lighten the load on (information-technology staff) because there will be fewer security concerns."