Transcript for UC Interoperability - 2011 Update

David Yedwab: Good afternoon everybody, this is David Yedwab and I am here today with the UCStrategies Team. Our topic today is one that has really grown over the past couple of years and it is the topic of UC Interoperability. Now, many of you may wonder what we mean when we’re saying “UC Interoperability.” I mean, doesn’t all the UC stuff work just like email and phone calls do?...that you just use a name or an address or a phone number and you can connect to anybody? Well, as those of us who had experience and played with the technologies and tried to deploy the technologies and use the technologies, even in some cases in single vendor environments, things don’t always work together. And they need to interoperate and there is a lot of activity going on across several standards bodies, peer-to-peer tests amongst vendor, user, and vendor tests, and yet we still have problems. Our team today is going to discuss several of those issues and to lead off the discussion, I would like Marty Parker to jump in and talk about some of the things that we learned from a joint session that we did with several vendors at Enterprise Connect. Marty?

Marty Parker: David, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to do that joint conference. It was done Wednesday morning at Enterprise Connect and we had a packed room. It was also videotaped by Enterprise Connect. We set the stage for the vendors by talking about the different types of interoperability and we listed about a dozen and graded them from relatively easy to relatively hard. For example, in the easy category, installing a new UC system, an interoperation between that system and an installed PBX standard, legacy PBX or IP-PBX, that’s pretty clear—it works. There are gateway vendors out there with kind of plug-and-play gateways to do this. If you had T-1 or Q.SIG on the new UC system you can probably talk to the installed PBX that way. So there are a lot of options there. If you are talking between UC endpoints on the same system, that works too. UC audio conferencing hooked up to the PSTN or an IP-PBX – those are all fine, headsets and speakerphones hooked up with the desktop PC or with the mobile device through USB or Bluetooth. Those are all just fine.

However, there are some challenging areas that we describe (refer to image below); areas that are only moderately easy like talking between “Brand A” UC system and “Brand B” UC system. And some of the things that are more difficult, like UC video desktop clients talking to UC video conferencing rooms, are a bit more challenging and I think John Bartlett is going to comment a bit on that later.

Mobile device UC applications, taking your UC experience, not just your voice and your email onto your mobile device, but actually taking the applications onto your mobile device, has more challenges because you are subject to each mobile device manufacturer’s OS environment and rules and so forth. It is getting easier, but it is still not very clear. And the various carriers’ rules about that and also the vendors have quite a few disparities between how they support the devices; Device A will do a certain set of things, and Device B another set of things. Customers don’t like to see that kind of variation and have to manage that.

So you’ve got a set of ideas here as to what is easy and what is hard and in the rest of this conversation I think you are going to hear more about what’s going on in the industry to make everything easy, and make the hard stuff get easy. So David, back to you.

David Yedwab: Thank you, Marty. Next as we mentioned, there are several vendors who are interested in the topic and a group of vendors formed the UC Interoperability Forum (UCIF), about a year or so ago, and that’s not to be confused with the Interoperability Forum of Interoperability that Wainhouse Research posted for their April fool’s joke this year. Jim Burton, would you mind updating us on the status of UCIF and progress that is being made?

Jim Burton: Sure, and David you are correct. It was about a year ago that it was publically announced that the UCIF was formed. They’ve grown to almost 40 members to date, but as was the problem a year ago, there are several very important members that have not elected to join, that includes Cisco, Avaya, and IBM. The challenge there was, it’s very, very political and both sides have their own side of this story. Both of them had worked hard to try and figure out how they can work together, but they had not been able to reach an understanding of how that is going to happen. What is very interesting to me on the sideline, though, is to observe that even though these vendors may not get together inside the UCIF, they are working to help their customers outside the UCIF. And Cisco and Microsoft are regularly announcing how they have worked on something and created interoperability.

The challenge for the UCIF I think, again it’s politics. I think everybody agrees and all of the vendors acknowledge the need for interoperability and the need for maybe a facility to help leverage that, but it just isn’t happening and quite frankly, I think that we probably over the next year won’t see any progress as far as the membership goes. However, the important thing is the UCIF is moving forward. They are working on interoperability. The primary focus is on video, but they are working on other important interoperability issues. I think that what we will see over time is that as they work on making sure that their members, their 40 important members, are working on these interoperability issues, that they probably will find, even though they may not be part of the UCIF, that some of the other big vendors will be participating indirectly in supporting some of the things that they have come up with. They all know it's important and as we look at video, we’re going to see all these little video devices running around that are going to want to work with corporate enterprise solutions and there is going to need to be interoperability there. So David, back to you.

David Yedwab: Great. Thank you, Jim. Don, you might want to add a little bit around the difference between standards and testing of interoperability – Don?

Don Van Doren: Thanks, David. Let me just build a little bit on what Jim just said – UCIF is really not designed to set up new standards. I think that’s something that perhaps is a misconception on the part of some enterprise customers. UCIF is really specifically designed to test standards that exist or have been promulgated outside. Most of those are through things like the IETF, with their “request for comment” process and it's those standards that are developed externally that have to be tested for interoperability to work. And I think the thing that is really crucial here, is that this is what is going to be so important, I believe, in the future. As many of us have said for a long time, UC is not something where one vendor can provide the entire solution. There is going to be a requirement for multiple vendors’ products to work together. And t his is going to become not only true within sort of the traditional communications kinds of environments, but I think increasingly as we get vertical market solutions where some application programming that’s been developed for say, healthcare, or manufacturing or some other particular activity – needs to the communications enabled. We are going to see the increased need for some kind of interoperability to be going on.

So I think it is important to distinguish between setting standards and then testing them, whether it's on a peer-to-peer basis, as David mentioned at the start, or whether it's through some large-scale bake-off kinds of activities where many vendors come together to show how their systems can interoperate effectively. That is going to be a really crucial element going forward.

David Yedwab: Thank you Don. Art, I was wondering if you wanted to comment about some of the multi-modal device issues around interoperability that you raise occasionally?

Art Rosenberg: Yes, I would like to just kind of drill down to the bottom line of UC, which has to do with the ability to make contact with a human being. Because making contact with a process is not a problem, it's the people who are either not available or busy or inaccessible or whatever and it makes no difference whether it's a person-to-person contact or it's a process-to-person, where you want to notify someone that, “hey it's time to take your pill or time to see your doctor or whatever it is.” But the point is that it is making contact with a person, or a person has made contact with something. So it really gets down to the level of the individual end user and the device that they have available that gives them that kind of flexibility, which has to be multi-modal because you never know, especially with mobile devices what they can do at that point in time. Are they driving a car? Are they sitting in a meeting? Is it a noisy environment? Can they talk, can they see? Whatever it is, they need that kind of flexibility to 1, initiate a contact or 2, respond to a contact. And it doesn’t make a difference whether it's from another person or not, because quite frankly things get a lot more efficient if you don’t have people in the middle all the time. And so, you want to be able to have applications – you want to be application independent. You want to be network independent, wire-to-wireless, and you want to absolutely be device independent because I am just reading now something that I got today – CIOs scrambling to adapt mobile device manager to a BYOD era. That’s the word that we have been preaching for a long time and guess what – it's happening.

David Yedwab: Well, I am a little bit more scared about interoperability on the freeway. Michael, do you want to comment about interoperability in the mobile space?

Michael Finneran: Sure. Well I am mobile and in one of those noisy environments. I did post a piece on mobile device management on the site just a few days ago (Step 1: Mobilize - Step 2: Manage). It’s an area I am looking at much more closely. But in terms of interoperability, we do fairly well in terms of interoperability within the mobile space, at least if the vendors want it. There are certain closed systems, for example the Blackberry Messenger System, which for them, maintains the real competitor advantage. Or Apple’s reluctance to support Flash. What has been missing though is really the interoperability between all these Jim Dandy things to do in the mobile space and wired UC. Even things so basic as the ability to text back and forth between an internal texting system and SMS. And there are gateways to that, but generally they are challenging and difficult to implement.

I’m confident about our getting interoperability in the mobility space. It’s a key driver in the entire industry because not everybody is going to buy a iPhone or a Blackberry or an Android, and they will absolutely have the requirement for all these different environments to communicate with one another. Beyond that there’s a ton of work still to be done with regard to how we link location, presence, and all the capabilities we have in the mobility space into the wired UC space. So David back to you.

David Yedwab: Thank you, Michael. The IMTC – another association – is doing a whole bunch of interoperability testing, primarily in the video space and John Bartlett might you want to comment about video interoperability in general, a real important topic?

John Bartlett: Thanks David. I think what I have seen is that the video market is exploding. So many more people are interested in video than they were just a few years ago and of course, what that means is that the vendors have responded and we’ve seen introduction of a lot of new technologies. We’ve seen a lot of startup companies appearing and all of that is good for users in the final analysis, but in the meantime, it means that there are some interoperability issues, because many of these new technologies come with new protocols or new approaches. And so, we’re seeing that a lot in the video space and finding the place where that stuff comes together and ties into the UC environment is somewhat difficult. We are seeing that major vendors are targeting specific UC platforms and Microsoft is always a great place to start – and figuring out how to integrate tightly with the Microsoft environment so those video components can become a component of the Microsoft environment and of course, they are also looking to do the same thing with Avaya and with Cisco and so on. It becomes a little trickier with Cisco, because Cisco has such a strong video program of their own – to have these other folks try to integrate into that. But there are a lot of partnerships trying to make that work.

But still, we are seeing a lot of changes out there. One of the big changes coming down the line is the introduction of scalable video coding or SVC, which I personally think, as a technology, has tremendous promise, but of course it's not compatible with what’s been going on in video conferencing within the enterprise, which is really using H264 AVC and so how those two technologies come together and sit together – especially in a connected enterprise environment is still to be worked out. Does the SVC technology sort of take over and then gateway to the old stuff, or is there some kind of binding between the two that has to happen more regularly?

And then, just to follow on with what Michael was saying, I see that – he was talking about this in the mobility space, but I think overall we need to have some good interoperability between consumer solutions and the enterprise because the enterprise is going to be looking outward and when they do, if they are not talking to their own people – if they are talking to their consumers, they need to interact with consumer technologies. We see that in just for instance, the recent announcement by Lifesize that they have integrated the Skype stack into the Lifesize endpoints, so now you can use a Lifesize and speak to Skype clients. And there is a similar kind of work being done by Avaya to integrate with Skype. So I think we are going to see more of that, where we have the consumer solutions which are out there and are big, and have to figure out ways of making those work back into the UC environment of the enterprise.

David Yedwab: Great, thank you, John. And now, where the rubber meets the road, the channel has got to deliver all this stuff and Pam, do you want to comment about the channel and interoperability?

Pam Avila: Sure, thanks David I appreciate it. You know one of the biggest challenges for the channel happens to be interoperability, because if they are out there working with customers and trying to find solutions to customers’ business needs, most of the time they are going to need a variety of products from a variety of sources to deliver a solution. And if those products do not interoperate – if the interoperability is not there – if we are looking at a proprietary environment in some instances, it makes it very difficult for the channel to gain any momentum in providing UC solutions to their customers. From their point of view, the best thing that they can do right now is to develop a vertical focus so that they can create a solution and test all the pieces, all the elements, and make sure that they work together and then replicate that over and over and over again, instead of spending a tremendous amount of time and energy building a new solution for every single customer they have. So I am going to turn it back to you, David.

David Yedwab: Interesting perspective, Pam. I believe Samantha has some comments.

Samantha Kane: Thanks very much David. I would like to touch on a little bit of a challenge in the interoperability responsibility and it's really the onus on the customer and the vertical. I will give you an example. In the utility/energy industry where they have store management and they have to overflow to an external resource for high-volume overflow – when does the responsibility start with the customer, when does the interoperability and its success end with the customer, and get picked up by the outsourcer? And then if the outsourcer sends back the information such as a non-match of information back to the customer, who picks up the responsibility then and what other kinds of interoperability responsibilities that both the client and the outsourcer partner has with each other and those FLAs?

So a lot of the interoperability is both vertically and horizontally challenged and it's also vertically challenged by the application of the particular customer and what they are trying to do with it. We recently worked with a club auto customer who are trying to deliver EPA to their customers who have emailed in, and obviously trying to deal with all the different hand units, as all of us have talked about in this conversation, and how do you make that happen? Do you just make it web-based and allow everybody or do you look at ops on an individual platform basis. So those are some of the challenges that customers are going to see more and more often, but they can’t be ignored.  

David Yedwab: Great, thank you Samantha. And all of you have brought up such interesting topics. I just might want to add or see if anybody else has anything they want to add before I close?

Dave Michels: This is Dave Michels. I will throw in a couple observations. I disagree with Michael about the state of interoperability with mobility. I’ve got a box full of cell phones because I have changed carriers so many times none of them work with each other – the carriers use different standards. I think that is one of the worst interoperability nightmares with the U.S. and that has been worse that a lot of other countries. I’ve got a closet full of phones, IP and digital phones phones, and none of them work on different systems and the SIP phones and IP phones are no better. I think the SIP standard has something like five different ways to put a call on hold and so therefore it is impossible for another vendor to take it off hold. You have companies like ShoreTel using MGCP. You have no two enterprises presence systems – IM systems that are compatible. You have Skype, which is completely in its own world. I think it's pretty much a disastrous world  when it comes to interoperability and I think it's terrible, but I don’t think it's going to change. I don’t think the UC effort is going to change it. I think that it creates a bit of a channel opportunity and it creates a bit of an opportunity for some start-ups, companies like Hookflash that are starting up and doing some interesting things. I just think it's really a shame that it’s the main thing and that the vendors just don’t seem to want to address it. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of effort, other than the lip service that interoperability is their top priority, but yet nothing works.

Don Van Doren: Let me just comment on one thing about that, Dave. To me a lot of this is reminiscent of what we went through, oh, a couple of decades ago with computer telephony integration. That whole effort started with a whole series of peer-to-peer relationships and an awful lot of native language programming going on to try and achieve some of those goals. And it took a few years and over time, we eventually got to a point where CTI was at least bit easier to accomplish. We never really came full bore on it. I think there’s a lot more momentum behind what’s going to happen with unified communications, especially because of the whole communications enabled business process opportunities that are out there. So I agree with you that things are a shambles right now in many cases, but I think it's early days, and I think we are going to see that coming around over time. But then I am an optimist.

Art Rosenberg: This is Art, I want to add my comment, because I don’t disagree at all and I think one of the things that is going to be a saving grace is that we are going to get away from the CPE view of communications that everybody has to have everything on premise and they manage and develop everything themselves and defend the service they use and now the question is – who’s services? So the cloud is coming in to do that. Mobility is coming in to do that, and now we have to watch out for the wireless carriers, because they are going to want to grab a piece of everybody just doing that, as well.

David Yedwab: Wow. So I take away from this that if I were an enterprise customer, I would be very leery about implementing a solution that hasn’t been tested and proven and have my vendors, my channel and everybody demonstrate solutions for me and hopefully, the world will get easier when we revisit this topic, perhaps in six months. Thank you all for attending. The references that Marty mentioned will be included in the transcript and thank you all and join us for our next podcast.