Transcript for Bernard Aboba and Jeff Rodman Introduce Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF)

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Executive Insights. This is Jim Burton. We have a special podcast today. We are fortunate enough to be talking with two of the founding board members of Unified Communications Interoperability Forum. Bernard Aboba from Microsoft, and Jeff Rodman from PolyCom. Welcome, gentlemen.

Jeff Rodman: Thank you, Jim. Glad to be here.

Jim: One of the questions that everyone has to ask is what is UCIF all about? What are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? And what are your challenges? Bernard, let us start with you.

Bernard: For us, the formation of UCIF started with complaints from customers. Today, customers have multiple systems often within their own enterprise. And they are trying to connect to other customers or other partners that are in the consumer cloud, or have other enterprise equipment. And very often, that is very difficult to achieve. And so they have come to us and emphasized the importance of interoperability. We have created bilateral programs, as have many other vendors. But they only scale so much. And there is really a need for a multilateral forum. And that is one of the motivations for UCIF.

Jim: Jeff, do you have additional thoughts on that?

Jeff: I think Bernard said it really well. A big part of the problem is that while there are numerous generally quite good solutions for unified conferencing, and for video conferencing, and voice, and messaging, and so forth; they typically only work reliably within their own infrastructures. And yet, different customers will be using different platforms. Different enterprises will have different platforms from one to another. And even within a single enterprise, they may have different elements of unified conferencing required from different vendors. So as a consequence, they do not work together well. And often they do not work together at all. We have been seeing this ourselves as vendors in different aspects of UC. And resolved finally after enough customer requests, realized this really is the primary issue today, is interoperability among different platforms, among different vendors, across different networks. So that is what UCIF is taking on.

Jim: Well Jeff, you kind of led into my next question -- the challenges and the difficulties. Unified communications is a complicated process because there are so many components that can make up the unified communication solution. No single vendor can do it all. And when you have got multiple vendors and multiple vendor environments, it creates a real challenge. So there are a lot of things that obviously UCIF is going to have to be working on. Have you got any examples of anybody else that has been able to accomplish resolving some of these interoperability issues? Any examples you can share with us?

Jeff: Well, I think there are numerous examples within individual platforms. I mean, one proof of concept is the fact that there are platforms that integrate multiple aspects of UC that are already robust and workable. It is just a crossing from one to another demonstrating interoperability is where the challenge lies. So I think given that it has been proved to be able to be done, that actually prioritizing the first issues to address and then working our way through them I think is going to be a pretty straight-forward process.  A whole lot of work is going to be involved. But I think we are looking forward to having some early successes in this.

Bernard: In terms of industry forums, the examples that are mentioned most frequently are the Wi-Fi Alliance, WFA. And as well as the W3C. I think the W3C might be the best analogy here, since web standards are notoriously complex. If you look at something like CSS, you have thousands of test cases. And that is the level of complexity that we are dealing with in UC. So obviously, web interoperability is far from perfect. But at least we have in that case, organizations taking on the problem. And that is what we are hoping to do with UCIF. It is to make a start and to develop a framework really for developing interoperability at the kind of scale that is required for UC.

Jim: Good example, Bernard. One of the things, because I know you are just getting started and there is a limited number of people that have joined already even though I know that number is approaching 20. But could you give us guidelines as to what kind of members will be joining? And any outline of membership opportunity? Who can join? Are there restrictions?

Jeff: This is a very open organization. It is open really to hardware and software solution providers. It is open to service providers, to network carriers, to vendors who are providing pretty much all aspects of UCIF solutions. So that everyone who has a stake in unified communications can participate in the development of clear interoperability among the different sections.

Jim: So Bernard, would I expect to see that the membership over time would include people who have some of the desktop applications like Microsoft, some of the PBX vendors that are traditional players of that space, as well as anybody that does some of the conferencing whether it is video, web, or voice conferencing? Would we expect to see those types of vendors being members in the future?

Bernard: Yes. The UCIF is open to everyone. And we are encouraging all vendors, hardware, software, consumer cloud vendors, enterprise vendors; all to join. We think this is a very big problem that almost everyone can contribute to. And we are opening the doors for everyone.

Jim: Well, I have taken a look at the list of the vendors that you shared with me. And it is very clear that there is a wide mix of people. It is hard to see that you are focused in on one specific area. But what areas will you be focusing in on first? Do you have some thoughts about the low hanging fruit of some of the interoperability issues that you will try to get working at first?

Bernard: The kind of things that have come up in initial conversations relate very frequently to video. I am not sure that it is a low hanging fruit exactly. But it is certainly a problem that customers have on their mind. Perhaps because it is the furthest from universal interoperability at the moment. I would say also in terms of the scenarios that customers talk to us about, we do hear a lot about interoperability between consumer clouds and enterprise solutions. Today you would be surprised how many enterprises need to connect to consumer clouds for one reason or the other. And those scenarios involve sometimes more than just instant messaging and presence. They can go into the video and audio realm as well. So that is certainly one issue, a big issue that has come up in many cases is how to get that interoperability going at scale so that a company can plug into any of its customers or partners that are connected to those consumer clouds.

Jim: One of the things that that kind of begs the question of, there is so much going on with social networking. Not only things like Twitter and Facebook, but things that the enterprises have within their own organizations for allowing people to have some social networking capabilities. Do you see that as part of an initiative that the UCIF would be working on?

Bernard: Well yes, because we are seeing a lot of those consumer clouds adopting XMPP in one form or another. The most recent I think is Facebook. Of course Google Talk has supported XMPP for quite a while. I think you will see others moving towards XMPP in one form or another. And of course with XMPP you have instant messaging and presence, but you also have multi-user chat and potentially Jingle for audio and video. So yes, a lot of those scenarios do impact enterprise as well. They are not purely consumer. And I think that there is a big demand. We hear requests all the time for connectivity between those consumer and social networking applications and enterprise solutions.

Jeff: It is interesting how quickly the worlds of traditional social media, if you could even use that expression, and unified communications are merging; are becoming one thing. It is more and more difficult to determine is this tool a social tool, or is it a basic business requirement? So I think that makes the mission of UCIF even more timely in this respect. And being able to bridge those two worlds across the different platforms.

Jim: I agree. In fact, I was very excited when I learned about UCIF. And realized that the UCStrategies team has been writing about the need for interoperability. In fact, we see that as one of the impediments to the growth of this marketplace is the challenge of interoperability. Of course, like it sounds like you have Bernard, we have been hearing it from customers as well. Saying that this is an issue that has got to be resolved. I am not about to give up one vendor over another, so they all need to work together. And I know that each of the vendors individually has worked really hard with other vendors to try to make it happen. But when you deal with one-on-one for every interoperability issue, it is quite a task. So I applaud you for your efforts.

Bernard: Yeah. I think that is a really important point. That bilateral interoperability has gotten us where we are. And you can go to a vendor and get their list of folks that they have done the testing with. But if we need to get to the world that our customers are looking for, which is anybody to be able to talk to anybody, we cannot get there using that approach. Our test budgets are really strapped right now. When you look at the amount of money that we are spending on this bilateral testing when vendors get together, and they look at their budgets it becomes clear very quickly that a lot of that testing would be better done and much more efficiently done in a common forum. To be able to share test frameworks, test cases, and all that. And if we were to do that, we think that we can go from the present bilateral framework to a much more universal framework at roughly the same cost. So there is also an economic argument to be made for UCIF. Certainly, if UCIF can even deliver half of what we are thinking we might be able to do, the impact on companies just in terms of their test budgets is going to be huge.

Jim: That is great. Well the other thing that makes it clear to me and that there is an opportunity for this market to expand. And so as it expands, everybody's slice of the pie gets bigger. So there is a real advantage, as you pointed out, for the end customer community. But also for the vendor community as well.

Jeff: I think that is right. It is a big advantage for IT organizations for the end customers. It is certainly an advantage for vendors, because they can proceed with assurance that the systems that they are developing will be functional. They are not going to have technical surprises as they proceed. I think that is the big advantage in both respects.

Bernard: Yeah. If we look at the unified communications market, it is clear to us that in 10 years we are going to have billions of people being able to do video, audio, instant messaging, data conferencing. And if you imagine that world that we are going to have, it is almost inconceivable 10, 20 years from now that we have the level of interoperability problems we have today. And there is a saying that if something cannot go on, it must stop. And so UCIF is about getting to that world that we all know is going to be there 10, 20 years from now. But making a start towards getting there now, and making the system work. Because if you look at the trends that we have today, many of the conventional telephony systems will probably be on the decline, if not in their sunset years 10, 20 years from now. If you look at AT&T's briefing to the FCC, pretty clear that plain old telephone service is going to be in a very difficult place in even five, or certainly 10 years. So we have got to get interoperability in unified communications or we will not have anything nearly as reliable to replace that with.

Jeff: I think it is an interesting point to look at when we are talking about the future, 10 or 20 years from now. That certainly the rate of innovation is not going to slow from what it has been. So the development of new tools, new formats, and new media is going to continue. To this point, there has been no unified way of approaching the integration of those new media into existing tools. And I think one of the things that UCIF does is to provide a general framework to allow for the graceful integration of new modalities as they are developed over the coming years.

Jim: Really good point. Well Bernard and Jeff, thank you so much for your time today. And congratulations. I know we in the industry are really appreciative of the efforts that you are putting in to make unified communications interoperability forum a success. Good luck.

Jeff: Thanks a lot Jim. We are very excited, and we are looking forward to everything that is coming.

Bernard: Thanks, Jim.