There’s a Shift Afoot

Looking for a great ice breaker? Try, “what’s your definition of UC?” It’s a favorite topic covered on this site and many others (never gets old). I myself have written many a posts along these lines.

In the past, I took an evolution of voice stance. Before I shoot this down (for the first time), let me explain it. People love to say the PBX is dead - that UC changes everything. The PBX was about voice, and UC is about voice, IM/Presence, mobility, CEBP/APIs, video, and collaboration. So if the conversation was about CEBP, using APIs to, for example, route the call to the right agent - someone would invariably say “this sure isn’t a PBX anymore.”  

I never agreed with that because it assumes the PBX is some model of technology frozen in time. But the PBX has indeed evolved for nearly 100 years and it isn’t about to stop. The orginal “PBX” was corded - switchboard operators would physically connect or switch people to complete calls. In the 1934 movie “Blind Date,” Ann Sothern mentions “the PBX.” The PBX evolved into an electro-mechanical device and in the 70s moved to digital computer technology (firmware, solid state), and around the 2000s began a transition to packet networks (VoIP).

During that journey there were plenty of evolutionary stumps abandoned in the dialog. We “dial” phones because they once had dials. A turned off phone was “on-hook” because placing the receiver on a hook turned it off. Even today, we still often describe the size of a phone system in terms of “ports” even though ports were effectively phased out starting 20 years ago. Today’s PBX is software driven, packet switched, and carries little to no resemblance to the “Blind Date” co-star. Nor does a 9” black and white television with 13 channels from 1970 share much with a current 62” Plasma - it’s called evolution.

So my position was that the PBX continues to evolve - and that evolution now calls for things like presence, IM, video, etc., to be included in the solution. Low and behold nearly every “PBX” manufacturer in the 80s that still offers solutions today just happens to include those in their UC solutions. The “UC” moniker effectively means voice is no longer the only form of communications we need to address, and use of the term implies a broader set of communication tools.

So my position in the past was UC was nothing more than PBX evolution; not replacement. Cisco and ShoreTel entered the voice business during the disruption of digital to VoIP. IBM and Microsoft are entering it during the disruption of VoiP to UC. All industries evolve, some faster than others, and UC is nothing more than that. I also felt that voice was the cheese pizza base of UC, and everything else (video, IM, presence, etc.) were the optional toppings. In other words, voice was the core. This has given many traditional players an edge.

But as I’ve alluded, my position is changed. I feel now that the core (the cheese base) of the UC pizza is collaboration. Collaboration is where the potential lies and where the focus needs to be.

Collaboration is far from new - the notion of people working together is about as obvious as they come. Technology enables us to communicate - email, phone, etc., but the tools of collaboration allow creation and learning. That’s why IBM bought Lotus back in 1995, declaring Groupware was the future. What is new is the simultaneous revolutions around mobility, broadband, cloud, and the web are all requiring and providing a totally new world of collaboration potential. Working and learning together is rapidly becoming the key to business survival due to the ever shortening half-life of knowledge and the increasing distances between our work-mates.

Consider the current situation:

• Travel costs are exorbitant and unlikely to drop.
  
  
• Travel is increasingly annoying. It's gone from perk, to neutral, to negative.
  
  
• Remote workers used to be suspicious liabilities to be accommodated only when absolutely necessary - how do we know they are working? That mood shifted, and now many acknowledge remote workers tend to work longer hours.
  
  
• Skills have a shorter lifespan than before. Organizations are realizing a need for more on-the-job training and development. Traditional off-site classrooms involving out-of-office responders are not viable.
  
  
• Employee retention strategies need to address flexibility and adaptability.
  
  
• The gap between potential and actual productivity is becoming too large to ignore. Cisco recently stated that by moving some of its internal events to an online format, they increased participation 10 times and cut costs a third.

I also took a fresh look around the industry, consider this:

• Cisco renamed many of their UC solutions to Collaboration solutions.
  
  
• Avaya’s messaging has transitioned to collaboration as well, from Aura to Flare to ACE - Avaya positions itself as a vendor of collaboration.
  
  
• Skype continues to grow in popularity, despite the numerous alternatives for cheap phone calls. I believe it's due to its growing and impressive collection of conferencing and collaboration tools.
  
  
• Microsoft Lync pushes real time communication and collaboration, voice is an option.
  
  
• Apple and Android are readying front-facing camera battles on mobiles.
  
  
• Enterprise video system players are embracing desktops and wireless devices for video conferencing and collaboration.
  
  
• Recent UC headlines: Siemens Enterprise Communications announces a new collaboration tool, Microsoft announces multi user collaboration on SharePoint 2010 and readies Office365 to counter Google Office. ShoreTel’s unflinching commitment to integrate with IBM SameTime. The continuing rise of the social networks (Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn).

The list goes on. The conclusion is knowledge flows that used to take place in conference rooms and near water coolers are being replaced by new critical tools of collaboration that break distance barriers. Knowledge flows occur in social and fluid environments where learning and collaboration take place increasingly in the form of virtual communities. This includes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

As organizations become increasingly decentralized, they must leverage strong foundational technologies to promote and preserve cross/inter/intra-enterprise communications. The shift afoot is our needs for communications are changing more rapidly than our communications systems. The prior shifts, analog to digital and digital to VoIP, were technology driven, not user driven. This time, its the users shaping communication needs - and they will meet those needs even if the organization doesn’t. Users are demanding better tools for collaboration. Screen sharing, document sharing, conferencing, polling, white-boarding - these are now the core components to UC.

Proverb: There once was a conference room and many great ideas were born. Then came the conference saucer which enabled timely great ideas as attendees could call and pester those late to come to the meeting. Soon the conference saucer was used to include remote workers and then came the great idea of more remote workers. Soon the conference room becomes empty, but the ideas that flow continue with even greater frequency.

3 Responses to "There’s a Shift Afoot" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 12/31/2010 11:28:44 AM

Dave,

I am glad to see that you have expanded your perspectives about communications. However, I think you have missed a key element about business communications - it isn't just about "person-to-person" contacts and "collaboration" anymore!

In business communications, it is also about information access, i.e., search and retrieval, and with the advent of mobile smart-phones, proactive, time-sensitive notifications by automated business processes to specific individual users (mobile staff, customers, etc.). Right there, you now have the reason that "UC" will be critical for every business process application that needs to initiate a contact directly with a person, rather than require a human to be the point of contact using traditional "person-to-person' facilities.

So, yes, collaboration is important, but it is NOT the only communication game in town! That is why CEBP will start becoming important as organizations start analyzing their business processes and start minimizing human labor expenses and sources of delay with automated contacts that directly communicate with individual users wherever they may be and in whatever modality they are available to use. At any point, if live contact is needed, the information recipient can "click-to-contact" and move to either real-time or asynchronous forms of communication with a person. That's what UC will do for business communications!

Good article but not complete!

Respectfully,

Art Rosenberg
The Unified-View
artr@ix.netcom.com

Don Van Doren 1/2/2011 2:15:01 PM

Great article, Dave.

I would suggest though that your comments point out another factor beyond PBX evolution that is driving the UC shift to enable more effective collaboration. That is a shift in the nature of collaboration itself from "voice-centric collaboration" to "document- and message-centric collaboration" on one hand, and (as Art points out) to "process-centric collaboration".

Certainly voice will continue to be an important element in the overall picture. But the appearance of Microsoft and IBM that you mention is because of the increasingly central place occupied by what is their sweet-spot, not because they are part of some PBX evolution. As you point out, "voice is an option" for Microsoft.

In my view, the next important step will be the incorporation of communications into process-centric collaboration. Business applications software (and eventually underlying operating systems) will enable seamless communications as part of the basic operations. Configuring UC will be much the same as selecting which printer to use to print a report.

UC will disappear into the plumbing. And then (finally) maybe we'll stop worrying about definitions and just make it a part of how work gets done.

Marlon Machado 1/6/2011 12:16:06 PM

Dave,

I've said many times that UC is the connective tissue that enables collaboration. In fact, we had this conversation at UC Summit last year (the last day after the closing session).

Most recently, I alluded to this on the Sametime Blog while commenting on Blair Pleasant's interview with Enterprise Communications Europe.

Don describes it very well: collaboration is shifting from being voice-centric to context-centric--this is how I would reconcile the document-centric and process-centric patterns we encounter today. From this perspective, UC is, as you point out, a bunch of toppings; a collection of capabilities that enable "modes" of communication. As a result, the PBX is no longer the center of the universe but it remains an integral part of it.

I agree with Art that CEBP is going to grow in importance. The way I see it, CEBP offers solutions to minimize the environmental impact (geography, time zones, culture, etc.) of the way we work today. It provides the guidance on how to build a neutral context in which all of us can operate. That context is primarily a collaborative one enabled by UC, in my view.

Regards,

Marlon Machado
Product Manager, Sametime Platform and Solutions
IBM