The big announcement today was Microsoft’s first public discussion of Communications Server “14”, the code name for the third release of OCS 2007. Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft’s keynoter, devoted much of the middle of his allotted time to the product demo, showing features such as location notifications alongside the already-existing presence status; the ability for this location status to flow through to local E911 services to address the mobility issue with emergency services; and the ability to access SharePoint from the Office Communicator client in order to enrich collaboration sessions.
Normally, I’d take the opportunity of this first newsletter after the big show to de-brief, maybe even run through my list of questions I’d posed two weeks ago, and try to answer them. But before I even do that, I’ve got to take this week to explain the new title of this newsletter, which of course became necessary when, last week, we changed the name of our brand from VoiceCon to Enterprise Connect.
Voice obviously remains a critical medium for enterprise communications, but, as we saw at (the last-ever) VoiceCon last week, the real issue isn’t voice vs. data vs. video. It’s realtime vs. non-realtime; synchronous vs. asynchronous; proprietary vs. standards-based interoperable vs. (probably the likeliest of all) standards-based non-interoperable. Those are the fundamental challenges that enterprise communications decision-makers confront going forward.
Kevin Kennedy’s VoiceCon keynote address focused heavily on the company’s commitment to SIP-based systems, based on the Avaya Aura platform that was introduced a year ago at VoiceCon. Kennedy presented several case study examples showing both immediate cost savings as well the potential to decrease time-to-sales. Kennedy demo’ed a very cool voice-enabled smartphone application that allowed drag-and-drop conferencing and document sharing on the fly. There was even an ability to pull a couple of conference call attendees into a sub-conference via the GUI, with no traditional telephony-style (i.e., dialpad-based) call control commands.
The subject was interoperability, and how everybody talks about it but nobody really does it. Manfred Arndt of HP said, “The reality is, standards aren’t enough.” Manfred suggested that Unified Communications elements needed to have a process and a certification very similar to what the WiFi Alliance came up with; other panelists quickly agreed that this kind of universally accepted testing and designation is what helped make WiFi ubiquitous.
However, this consensus about the need for ubiquitous compliance only served to remind our panelists about vendors’ typical unwillingness to live by such specifications—a deficiency that each speaker found particularly noteworthy in his competitors’ approaches. As I detailed in this No Jitter post from this morning, the biggest flareup came between Phil Edholm of Avaya and Warren Barkley of Microsoft, who sparred over which was less interoperable—Microsoft’s Office Communicator client or Avaya’s proprietary call control protocol. My co-moderator for the session, Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group, rightly observed that a pretty damning case could be made against just about all vendors in terms of being interoperability-challenged, in one important scenario or another
I happen to think cost-cutting is going to continue to dominate the discussion when we convene VoiceCon Orlando 2010 at the end of this month. That cost cutting mandate isn’t going away even if the economy improves, particularly because the cost side of the UC scenario is still pretty uncertain, given that UC could represent some pretty fundamental changes to the architecture and the applications picture. Indeed, CDW reported that, while business improvements were the biggest *driver* for large enterprises to adopt UC, their two biggest *concerns* about UC were cost and cost—i.e., capital costs and operating costs. In other words, they want the business benefits, but not to the point of ignoring what it costs to achieve them.
This balance of business benefits and costs is going to be a theme running throughout VoiceCon Orlando 2010, and I expect it’ll be a particular focus of our User Forum, the regular session we run each VoiceCon in which we talk with end users about where they’re at with communications technology. One of the more interesting case studies we’ll have onstage in Orlando is that of Accuquote, a provider of online insurance quotes that implemented UC as part of a business automation strategy. As it happens, Accuquote will also have a speaker on our next VoiceCon Webinar, which takes place next week. On March 17, we’re running a webinar. That webinar will focus on Business Process Automation, and I’m looking forward to hearing Accuquote’s story.
