Unified Communications – What I didn’t Hear Much of at VoiceCon
I have to say that I love the whole concept of Unified Communications, but, after wading through the flood of press and meetings during and post-VoiceCon I keep getting struck with thoughts on what is missing from UC. It is broadly applicable and complex, not the neat little bucket that unified messaging was when it was first talked about. In the early days of UM, our biggest worry was where were the voicemails, faxes and emails being stored? Not so with UC. We have layers of complexity that most companies haven’t begun to think about. Plus we have several industries if you separate data from telecom, which are pushing the concept of unifying communications for the betterment of business and mankind, not just one, so how do we get there from here? Here is where all the vendor hype is. There is made up of real deployments, with ROI, applications working seamlessly together, unhindered on well run and provisioned networks. The middle of here and there is where it gets scary.
The first issue I pondered was what are we unifying and how? Well, applications and business processes of course, including instant messaging, unified messaging, voice messaging, chat, collaboration and presence, etc., along with business applications. Funny, but even in a Greenfield world where start-up companies have tons of money to spend, and have sophisticated users, this isn’t so easy. Why? Even the big guys in the UC space can’t do everything themselves. They sometimes have to rely on other companies’ servers, applications or networks in order to provide complete UC functionality. So, for every application we add on to any customer’s network we entertain trouble.
The big guys understand they can’t provide every piece of UC themselves, and so one of the themes of VoiceCon were bold statements on companies partnering with and working with each other, i.e., keynotes and announcements from players like Cisco and Microsoft, IBM and Siemens, for example. In a similar vein, companies also announced new products through development or acquisition. For example, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Parlano and IBM similarly announced WebDialogs, to help fill out their UC portfolios.
But all the budding relationships and talk about working together, federation, etc, still didn’t make me feel comfortable with the most nagging issue, which is who is going to help all these companies discover what the impact will be on their current networks by adding on UC applications, and who is going to make sure that everything runs smoothly? Who is going to make sure everything works together and that network traffic isn’t impeded? This seems to be a gaping hole, especially considering these same vendors speak about selling into the SMB market, where broad network expertise and large IT budgets aren’t necessarily the norm.
For example, have companies thought about the impact of adding IM? If internal only that is one thing, but open it up to the outside world and you have increased traffic and security threats, and depending upon the company, you might have to log and archive messages. Even without UC we have examples of how simple things can have unexpected consequences to a network. For example, the existence of YouTube and MySpace if not controlled can slow a network to a crawl and if voice is carried over that network what happens to the calls? Are they dropped, do you experience delay?
Its not that all of these applications can’t be made to work together, or that various integrations within product sets/suites won’t be seamless, or that there aren’t savvy IT departments that are willing catchers for any and all UC applications thrown at them. Any company can deliver to a controlled set of customers given the proper resources. Its just that at VoiceCon I wasn’t seeing or hearing, as a theme, detailed plans of support from vendors, and I wasn’t seeing a lot of real deployments of multi-function UC either.
In short, I’d like to see us walk before we run. Along with product and partner announcements I’d like to hear support announcements, education for prospects on how to plan for UC and its pitfalls, and have the industry address how we are going to implement each step of the UC process.
I’ll be really interested to see what is the impact of SaaS will be in the UC space. How will products like Microsoft’s Quality of Experience Monitoring Server help? Are we making headway with certification programs such as Cisco’s Master Unified Communications Specialization? Most importantly, I’d like to see network planning, integration, and application support be a central theme at the next VoiceCon show, on par with hype about what the promise of UC can do. Check back here and on my blog at www.jamison-consulting.com over the next few months to see how vendors respond to these types of questions.