UC Interoperability Now Has a Champion
UCIF Announcement Offers a Forum for Industry Cooperation
Essentially from the outset, Unified Communications has required interoperability, in many dimensions. If you follow our UCStrategies.com UC definition, “Communications integrated to optimize business processes,” then you immediately see the need for interoperation between communications and business applications. Even at the basic levels of assembling a solution, UC is evolving so quickly that the innovative technology elements (presence, IM, smart phones, HD video, USB and Bluetooth devices, SIP phones or devices, and more) need to interoperate with the core communications and network infrastructure.
The hue and cry on this topic has been loud, diverse, and widespread. Panels at VoiceCon and InterOp, especially when customers are involved, almost always raise the issue of interoperation. Customer RFPs for systems and solutions have to be designed to require interoperation or to limit the solutions to a single brand. And, even the single brand is not a guarantee of seamlessness, as the many UC elements are may have come through acquisitions or have been developed on different technology platforms.
But this week an industry group announced they are forming the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF). The UCIF is described as “an open alliance of technology leaders working together to fully realize the potential of Unified Communications.” The UCIF says that their vision is “to enable interoperability of Unified Communications Hardware and Software across enterprises, service providers, and consumer clouds, as a means of generating incremental business opportunity for all stakeholders in the ecosystem.” You can read more about the new UCIF at http://www.ucif.org.
The UCIF seems to have a solid program and a solid model. The program includes a broad range of communications functions such as IM, presence, conferencing, and various media; end-point interoperation was not prominent in the description, though several UCIF members specialize in end-points, so that’s likely to be covered. The program also includes methods for developing standards and for test suites to assure compliance to those standards. And, the program includes a method by which additional solution producing companies can readily join the forum.
This is good news. In the early days of computer telephony integration (CTI), several forums emerged to define a set of standards which enabled the explosive growth of the call center market, since it enabled a new level of programmable control of voice communications. These included CSTA (Computer-supported telecommunications applications sponsored by the European Computer Manufacturers Association – ECMA), TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface – a Microsoft API), TSAPI (Telephony Server Application Programming Interface – sponsored by AT&T (now Avaya) and Novell), and JTAPI (Java Telephony Application Programming Interface – sponsored by Sun). Though the interfaces were developed by competing interests, the existence allowed the ecosystem of value added resellers, systems integrators, and customer programmers to integrate the system elements. This resulted in dramatic improvements in serving customers, prospects and employees by phone or interactive voice response (IVR).
Now, in the growth phases of UC, similar opportunities exist. With easy, flexible, and published interoperability standards and the accompanying tools, growth in the UC market will be stimulated. This stimulus should come in at least these four ways:
- With legacy equipment. UC will not have a high adoption rate if enterprises must rip and replace or perform massive upgrades in order to implement top notch UC applications. Almost every case study on UC points to implementation of UC for some specific business role (the UC-U or User Productivity mode) or some specific business process (the UC-B or Business Process mode). Therefore, new UC solutions must interoperate with installed systems.
- Across media channels. UC often shifts communications to different media. Certainly presence (which allows the avoidance of rich-media calls to persons not available) and instant messaging or social media messaging are shifting many communications sessions away from e-mail, voice and video due to the intrinsic efficiency of those media. However, we are now seeing communication sessions that can shift seamlessly to and from IM to voice or video calls to conferences or to desktop sharing. Obviously, there are opportunities for effective interoperability between federated systems or between diverse end-points that may be used by the participants.
- With applications. This is the big deal, and the UCIF will be well served to include business application producers in their member ship and recruitment. An increasing number of roles in an increasing set of industries are working in direct interface to a real-time business application during most or all of their workday. This could be healthcare professionals working with an electronic health record, financial professionals working with client portfolio and trading systems, educators working with electronic classroom systems, and on and on. The workers, their employers and the applications providers will all want communications integrated with the workflow. Either the communications industry, with leadership such as the UCIF, will to this or the applications providers will inevitably build it in for themselves. With proper UCIF type work, the applications providers and enterprises will find it easier to interoperate than to re-create.
- With popular multimedia devices. This is an area of huge opportunity because the gaps are so large and obvious. How can it be that a huge portion of the innovation in wired and wireless communications devices is coming from the consumer or, arguably, the IT community? But since it’s true that BlackBerry, iPhone, Bluetooth headsets, and PCs are far outselling IP telephones in most enterprises (or to the enterprises employees and customers) the need for interoperability should be compelling, as well as obvious.
So, the UCIF seems to be addressing a major requirement, and none too soon. Sure, there will be naysayers with their critiques: “It won’t make it,” or “Some companies are missing,” or “We’ve seen this before.” Yet, we’ve heard those types of critiques before, too, and standards bodies have pressed on to deliver value, community and, dare we say it, interoperability. (Have you checked the brand name of the disk drive in your PC lately? Bet it doesn’t match the chassis.)
So, we wish the UCIF success. Growth of the UC marketplace and UC solution sets are linked to that.
UCIF Information on UCStrategies.com