This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by IBM:

Unified Communications And Collaboration—IBM Calls It UC²
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from these complexities. IBM solutions work with the industry leaders; IBM partners are your partners. IBM calls it UC².

What can you say about a week when you heard from everyone from Allan Sulkin to Al Gore, where you saw Microsoft and IBM representatives shake hands and promise to work toward interoperability, and where the CEO of Avaya, Lou D’Ambrosio, summoned communications decision-makers to help save the country from recession?

I have never had a joke fall as flat as when Fred Knight asked the final Locknote panel what our takeaway was from the show, and I said, “The robe from my hotel room.” In keeping with the “green” theme of Al Gore’s Telepresence keynote, I am recycling that joke here. I’m doing it for the children!

But my actual takeaways were these two themes: Interoperability and Integration, which also happened to be 2 of the “I” words that Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft highlighted in his Wednesday keynote. There was a lot of talk about both of these topics, and after a few days’ rest, here’s where I think those themes were advanced.

In terms of Interoperability, the big moment was the on-stage handshake between Eric Swift of Microsoft and Pat Galvin of IBM (see our No Jitter blog entry). This was a significant moment because we at VoiceCon/No Jitter, as well as Jim Burton of UCStrategies, the co-moderator of the session, plan to hold these guys to it. It’s put up or shut up time, and if they don’t come through, that’ll tell us something, as well, about how closely the reality of Unified Communications can be expected to align with the hype.

And it’s not going to be just Microsoft and IBM. We extend the invitation to all of the other companies to play. But, frankly, Microsoft is considered to be the company most likely to perceive a benefit in not interoperating, so all eyes will be on them. But while we’re at it, I’d love to see some Cisco and Avaya gear working together—and I mean something beyond Avaya software running on a Cisco telephone.

If it turns out that the key companies in the industry want merely to pay lip service to the idea of interoperability, we hope it’ll be a benefit to you for them to reveal that bedrock position sooner rather than later, so you can adjust your expectations accordingly. On the other hand, if we’ve taken the first steps down the road to true multivendor interoperability, then we’re really onto something.

The integration issue turned up especially in relationship to the contact center. Hopefully we’re getting beyond the idea that everybody should be a de facto contact center agent. This model has its uses, but I thought the smartest keynote came from Avaya’s Lou D’Ambrosio, who illustrated not how to bring the enterprise into the contact center, but rather how to bring the contact center into the enterprise. It seems a very wise, efficient use of resources to make your contact center agents the virtual equivalents of your sales agents—to me, this is truly virtualizing the enterprise. Avaya also showed examples of automating the process as well, by integrating bar code readers and other in-store technology.

One of the things we keep hearing is that Unified Communications will segment into industry verticals, with separate solutions being developed for health care, retail, etc. The Avaya keynote showed something of how that could work.

I’m proud to say that at VoiceCon Orlando last week, everybody delivered. Dennis Schmidt of Bank of America gave a detailed, compelling, passionate account of his journey through IP telephony as a customer; Al Gore roused the audience with his commitment to using technology as one tool to help solve the global warming crisis; and our array of vendor keynoters and, most especially, end user speakers, offered concrete success stories and innovative ideas.

I’m going to be thinking about—and blogging about—last week for some time to come. I hope you’ll join in the conversation. Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Unified Communications, Implementation, Applications, VOIP, Tech Trends, Market Trends |

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