This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by VoiceCon Spring 2007:

VoiceCon Spring 2007, the premier event for enterprise IP Telephony, Converged Networks and Unified Communications. will be held March 5-8 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando. Meet the industry’s market and thought leaders during in-depth tutorials, candid roundtable discussions and insightful panels. And the VoiceCon Exhibition presents ALL of the suppliers–equipment and services–in one location. For full details: http://www.voicecon.com/spring/index.php?priorityCode=MLMSVFAN

Register by January 26 and save up to $500: https://secure.voiceconspring.com/2007/portal/registration/MLMSVFAN

Avaya’s recent Unified Communications announcement provides a perfect illustration of what’s right and what’s wrong with today’s UC marketplace.

First the good news: Having an important player like Avaya commit itself to UC helps validate this emerging market. The essence of the announcement is the grouping of Avaya’s communications tools and products into four “Editions” that will be available in the first-half of 2007:

• Essential Edition begins with IP Telephony and voice messaging for office users.
• Standard Edition adds the Avaya One-X interfaces and mobility tools for productivity gains.
• Advanced Edition adds voice and web conferencing for collaboration support.
• Professional Edition tops the list with speech-enabled mobility and desktop-video calling.

This repackaging of Avaya’s solutions should help customers more easily adopt the improved communication tools. The mobility elements of the Standard and Professional Editions will be augmented by Avaya’s concurrent acquisition of Traverse Networks.

Now for the troubling part: While it’s great that Avaya, like many suppliers, is jumping on the UC bandwagon, there is an enormous lack of consistency in what vendors actually offer under the UC umbrella. This isn’t just a matter of semantics, as offerings have been announced that are dead ends: They won’t work in an open UC environment. Offerings are being announced that are unified within a specific solution set, but won’t work with products and applications from other vendors.

While some vendors, and Siemens comes to mind, are trying to be open and to integrate with other vendors’ UC offerings and components, no supplier (or supplier/partner combo) offers what I would consider to be a truly unified solution.

Avaya’s latest UC announcement is a perfect case in point. One the one hand, as pointed out by my colleagues Blair Pleasant and Marty Parker in their recent blogs (http://www.ucstrategies.com and http://www.voiploop.com), Avaya realizes that it is not going to own the desktop, so rather than forcing customers to use an Avaya client, Avaya’s UC solutions will integrate with the Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Sametime and Jabber clients. This is a smart move and I applaud Avaya’s approach.

But will Avaya’s unified messaging and speech access products interoperate with Avaya’s presence server or with Microsoft’s Office Communicator and IBM’s Sametime? Will Avaya let Microsoft’s future Office Communication Server (OCS) provide call control in an Avaya UC solution, rather than Avaya’s Communication Manager? In short, is Avaya clarifying what a UC solution should look like, or is it adding to the confusion?

I don’t mean to pick on Avaya; they’re certainly not the only company doing this. For example, Cisco has rebranded everything under the “Unified Communications” moniker, but Cisco’s solution is neither open nor unified. And Nortel, which is working hand-in-hand with Microsoft, offers point solutions, such as its MCS 5100, which only interoperates with Microsoft’s products, not IBM’s. And what do these vendors have to say about presence federation? Not much, I’m afraid.

So, here’s the bottom line: Everyone is marching toward a unified solution, but no one is there yet.

What needs to be done? The most important thing for vendors to do, especially the switch and telephony vendors, is to develop and present a road map that acknowledges: “Yes, I have product silos, but if you buy these pieces, in a short period of time they will link with the other elements of your business processes to provide an interoperable, results-oriented solution.” And they need to specify a time table so enterprises will know how long it will be before something they’re purchasing now will become part of a true UC solution.

The most important thing for enterprise customers to do is to remain skeptical: Press the vendors to explain how they will interoperate with UC products and applications from other vendors. Get specifics about when and how your supplier will provide each element (call control, presence, message store, mobile interface, etc.), and how these solutions will work not only within your enterprise, but within your value chain of partners, suppliers, and customers.

One of the major promises of Unified Communications is that we’ll finally get solutions that interoperate, that work together. UC is still in its early days, but we need to see more progress on fulfilling that promise.

Jim Burton
Founder, CEO, CT Link

Posted in Applications, Implementation, Jim Burton, Unified Communications |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.