This article is an update of something I first wrote two years ago, but it has taken this long for UC to start becoming a product reality for end users, so its appropriate to start looking at it from that perspective, rather than just an IP infrastructure perspective.
Although the original article discussed Microsoft’s announcement of it’s big UC push with Office Communications Server 2007, IBM was more quietly working on doing the same with a focus on its SameTime IM capabilities.” I called UC an “elephant” because it reminded me of the old story of a group of blind people who surround an elephant and try to describe it by touching only one part of its body (trunk, tusks, tail, feet, etc.)
Up till now, though, we didn’t really have an “elephant” to touch; telecommunications technologies were “silos,” separated at every level from network wired and wireless transport and switching, to application server platforms, to end user desktop and mobile devices, software clients, and interfaces. With IP interoperability and convergence taking place at all these levels and now with the addition of a new, real-time “brain” (presence/availability/modality management) for individual end users) at the top, business communications will start becoming a single, complete “elephant” that can function much more flexibly, intelligently, and efficiently for communicating with people. However, both the technology industry and the enterprise markets will have to stop being blinded by the past in order to understand and exploit the future.
The second big announcement I wrote about was interesting, but turned out to a disappointing dud. It was about a new startup, funded by some knowledgeable industry experts, to offer “federated” presence services to business organizations that need to provide UC capabilities across enterprise boundaries. It never really got off the ground and the need for presence standards and federation still remains to be fulfilled.
The Need For a Converged Communications Presence “Brain”
The Unified-View has been preaching the gospel of unified messaging and unified communications from the user’s perspective for many years now. In an article I wrote for Business Communications Review in 2004, I called attention to the obvious need for accommodating such end user needs to gain useful enterprise productivity, which is a combination of individual time-savings (micro-productivity) and group task time-savings (macro-productivity) through more efficient communications between people. But until the multi-modal communications infrastructures converge, it is difficult, if not impossible, to take care of different end user needs cost efficiently and effectively.
Instant messaging and presence management services for text messaging have been around for several years, but locked up by the public service providers, most notably AOL, which did it’s best to kill any interoperability with competing services.
Microsoft announced secure IM and presence for internal enterprise usage with their Live Communications Server and was able to get agreement from service providers AOL and Yahoo to interoperate with their enterprise product. Enterprise telephony providers, most notably Siemens with its OpenScape product, and Nortel with its Multimedia Communication Servers (MCS), focused their use of presence primarily on enterprise internal telephone and Instant text messaging contacts. Clearly, all forms of communication, including “urgent” message notification and delivery, have to be part of the service to business users wherever they may be and for any communication device they may have.
IBM Jumps On The UC Bandwagon With It’s SameTime Technology
So, here we are two years later and IBM has made some big 2008 announcements for it’s “UC elephant,” alias SameTime Advanced at it’s Lotusphere conference. For more details, listen to Blair Pleasant’s interview with Bruce Morse, VP of Unified Communications Software, Lotus Software (http://www.ucstrategies.com/detail.aspx?id=2362).
What is most notable about IBM’s directions is the extension of real-time UC capabilities “virtually” outside of the enterprise organizationally for collaborative interactions, which is traditionally alien to telephony CPE. Needless to say, the emphasis on the user interface for UC will be the battleground for enterprise UC market dominance between Microsoft and IBM.
What Do You Think?
Will presence services become the heart of all person-to-person communications once everything is federated? Will federation services become competitive and interoperable, i.e., a “federation of federated services”?