A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by The VoiceCon Tour 2007:

“Reality Check on Unified Communications”—VoiceCon Tour 07 Registration Is Open:
VoiceCon is coming to a town near you—Anaheim, Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago and will be co-located in New York with Interop NYC. The agenda focuses on Unified Communications, and will help you decide when and how to invest in UC technology. For details on dates, locations and agenda visit voicecon.com/tour/ and register with VIP CODE: MLXKVT02 to secure your “Early Bird” discount.

Really, all I did was a question. And I thought it was a simple question: “If UC is the answer, then what’s the question?”

I posed it to open a featured panel session during last week’s VoiceCon San Francisco, and from that moment on, I and my co-moderator, Yankee Group’s Zeus Kerravala, lost all control. The panelists, senior execs from Avaya, Cisco, Digium, IBM, Microsoft, Siemens and Skype, gave answers that were all over the map.

“It’s about the network.”

“It’s about software.”

“No, it’s about applications.”

“Well, yes, it’s about software and applications, but the key is really about openness.”

“UC is about business processes…. If you focus on just the communications aspect, you’ll miss the boat.”

“It’s about cost-savings.”

“It’s about improving efficiencies and responsiveness, and enabling businesses to become more proactive.”

Well, I guess I should be grateful for small favors. Nobody had the chutzpah to suggest that UC would cure baldness or restore peace and tranquility to Iraq. But, if the session had run longer than the allotted 60 minutes, those might have been brought up. (A video of the session will be available for viewing next Friday, September 7, at voicecon.com/videos/.)

The dilemma is obvious: If UC is about everything, it runs the risk of becoming about nothing. My friends at UCStrategies.com have worked hard on trying to define UC (see Blair Pleasant’s recent contribution to this newsletter), but because the stakes associated with UC are high, the vendors are trying to leverage into UC from their existing strengths.

Cisco emphasizes the network and infrastructure; IBM and Microsoft emphasize software, while Digium refines that emphasis to Open Source. Meanwhile, established telephony providers like Avaya and Siemens are out to prove that they “get it”—they understand that they can’t keep selling what they’ve sold in the past. But UC puts them in real jeopardy: They are being squeezed by Cisco at Layers 1–3 and Microsoft and IBM at Layers 4 and above.

The net result? Our session at VoiceCon was incredibly entertaining and, from the audience’s reaction, useful. But I walked away concerned that we generated more heat than light.

I don’t have a dog in this fight…I’m not lobbying for one definition over another, one emphasis over another. I want to see more effort on unifying UC but instead, I see proponents working harder to protect market share than on proving what UC can deliver, when and at what cost.

Consultants like Marty Parker and Don Van Doren (UniComm Consulting) can describe specific implementations that have yielded positive results. But notwithstanding the work by UC pioneers, we’re in the earliest of stages in UC’s evolution, so the promises about “openness,” and “improving business processes” or “improving efficiencies” remain, well, promises. What’s needed are case studies, details about pricing and availability, and proof that UC’s piece-parts will fit together and interoperate, in both single- and multi-vendor deployments.

We’ve been here before. During 2000–2001, there was plenty of talk about IP Telephony and there were vigorous debates over what benefits IPT would/could deliver and about which architecture was the best. Once systems started going into production networks and a base of experience and knowledge was established, many of those questions evaporated. New ones have taken their place—like what limits/trade-offs software-centric architectures impose, and how to manage and secure IPT networks—but the point is that the rhetoric about UC needs to be replaced by concrete actions—more product availability, real deployments in real environments, and documentation of the real results.

To help in that effort, VoiceCon, with support from Ed Mier of MierConsulting and Siemens, have put together a template for a next-gen RFP/RFI for enterprise communications and, not surprisingly, UC is prominently featured. We’re putting that template out as a kind of Open Source project—we invite you to read it, critique it, edit it and then share your comments/revisions with the rest of the enterprise communications community. Check it out at voicecon.com/wiki.

UC isn’t a silver bullet that will solve all business ills, nor does it represent the end game for enterprise communications products and services. It’s time to quit promising the moon and start delivering the fundamentals, and we hope this next-gen RFP/RFI template will be a step in the right direction.

What do you think? Drop me a line at fknight@cmp.com or here in the UC eWeekly Forum.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, Business Communications Review

Posted in Standards, Management, Market Trends, Fred Knight, Unified Communications |

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