More Than UC Standards - New Industry Organization To Help Bring “Mix and Match” Interoperability to Future UC-Based Applications
Everyone seems to be confused by the term “unified communications.” Some think it represents a specific communication product or service, some think it is just a concept that can be implemented in a variety of ways with a specific group of communication products or services. No matter how you look at UC, though, it involves several communication technologies that have to interoperate very simply and effectively and that’s never easy.
UC is complex because it represents a variety of different ways to communicate with people, both at the user interface level as well as at the technology infrastructure level. The multiplicity of UC-related technologies can’t all be provided by a single developer. From an interoperability perspective, however, the number of standards needed to cover all the flexibility that UC interactions require are too many and too complex to define or implement easily.
Payoff of Interoperability To User Needs
Obviously, both the technology definitions and concept perspectives of UC are important, but what is most critical is enabling all kinds of end users to benefit from having communication flexibility and efficiencies in their choice of user interfaces. That flexibility of choice is now becoming increasingly necessary because of the rapid consumer adoption of mobile “smartphones.” This choice will be available whether a “user” is initiating a new contact or responding as a recipient of a contact initiated by someone else, including a “proactive,” automated business application process (CEBP).
In fact, we see one of the biggest payoffs of UC will be the ability for individual users to exploit the use of mobile smartphones to be more accessible and interact directly on a personalized basis with any automated business process application. For all of this flexibility to be realized, on an end-to-end basis from any endpoint device with UC multimodal flexibility, there has to be universal interoperability across all UC infrastructure components that may be involved. The problem is, however, that there are not enough technology standards (yet) to cover the complexities of UC usage.
Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) Formation Announced
In response to the critical need to make UC applications more “open,” across any UC application network framework, and to satisfy a consistent UC “experience” for all individual end users, the formation of a new, “open alliance” of technology leaders involved with developing various elements of UC technologies and services, was announced today. Named the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), the group is open to membership by any organization that is developing UC technologies and is interested in supporting interoperability with other UC technologies.
Jim Burton, of UCStrategies.com, noted that:
“Even though vendors work hard to follow standards, standards are open to interpretation and it creates interoperability problems. The UCIF will help solve those problems by providing a venue for testing and working with other companies to ensure that products are interoperable before they’re delivered to a customer.”
“By working together, the UCIF will help make the UC market grow sooner than it would otherwise, with each vendor now able to get their share of a larger pie.”
The initial UCIF Founding Board Members include:
Bernard Aboba
Principal Architect
Microsoft
Matt Collier
VP, Business Development
Logitech/LifeSize Communications
Mark Gorzynski
Chief Scientist
Hewlett Packard
Gregory Lebovitz
Senior Director
Juniper Networks
Jeff Rodman
Co-founder, CTO
Polycom
For more details on UCIF membership participation, you can get more information and objective insights by UC Strategies experts at www.ucstrategies.com.
Benefits For UC Growth
Up till now, it has not only been difficult to describe what “UC” really means, but also, when it came time to plan an implementation of UC, there were no standards that could be used for selecting UC technology components and services. The various communication applications like IM, social networking, UM, and CEBP applications, were not really organized to be easily implemented and integrated wherever desired on an application or end user basis. As a result, the promises of UC providing benefits to individual users (UC-U) or to business application processes (UC-B), were “blowing in the wind!”
With an “open,” cooperative group of leading industry providers and objective industry experts taking charge of organizing all the elements of UC, things like:
Terminology and definitions
Identifying interoperability needs and priorities for both real-time and asynchronous testing and certification
Establishing easy to use interoperability testing and certification procedures
Structuring the UC framework so that there will be a clear and objective differentiation of functional roles for UC-based applications
Coordinating UC standards with standards of other communication applications
Establishing appropriate metrics for evaluating various levels of benefits from implementing UC capabilities in different ways
Support a common UC ecosystem that will subsume and not conflict with other standards-based technologies
Etc.
can become better structured for practical implementation for the technology providers, the market, the individual end users, the service providers, and the enterprise IT support staff.
We can expect the UCIF to help break the gridlock that currently exists between the communication technologies of the future and existing technologies that still work. This will benefit all individual end users and the applications they use, as well as business organizations of any size that must support specific application needs for those end users.
Opening The Doors to Mobile UC Services
It is well recognized that UC flexibility has its greatest payoffs to end users who are mobile and will be using a variety of multimodal “smart-phones.” In addition to helping to define all the necessary standards that the full spectrum of UC functionality will require, the UCIF can also provide an operational framework that will facilitate ongoing interoperability testing and certification of any UC software technology product or service.
This UCIF facility will be very useful to help drive and support new hosted and “cloud-based” UC applications, as well as to help expand “open” interoperability between Mobile UC services. The latter is particularly strategic, since the wireless carriers still seem to be trying to lock in dominance over their customer endpoint devices and associated mobile applications. Wireless mobility at the individual end user level must be a basic modality option for the UC framework.
UCIF Information on UCStrategies.com