A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com, originally posted May 30, 2007
Last week’s Interop in Las Vegas created another opportunity to gauge the current state of the UC marketplace. Unlike VoiceCon, UC was not Interop’s main-tent attraction, because the show attracts a lot of network architects and engineers who are focused on architecture design, security, performance, SOA, applications to use network capacity and other topics. In short, Interop is a broad network show.
So, while UC wasn’t the focus of the Interop keynotes given by John Chambers (Cisco), Mike Zafirovski (Nortel), Bob Muglia (Microsoft), Louis J. D’Ambrosio (Avaya), Tom Noonan (IBM and Internet Security Systems) and Dave DeWalt (McAfee), UC themes of interoperability, collaboration and links to business processes were interlaced throughout all but the IBM/McAfee presentation. For more analysis of UC in the keynotes, read Blair Pleasant’s blog.
During the rest of the conference, there were three sessions focused on UC, organized by UCStrategies.com :
- Reality Check on Unified Communications. Jim Burton moderated a discussion with Blair Pleasant, Marty Parker and me about the status of the UC market and vendors, and our prognostications about the future direction.
- The Battle for the Unified Communications Desktop Application. Jim moderated a panel with Chris Thompson from Cisco and Tony Bawcutt from Microsoft, with Blair providing an opening perspective on the many vendors delivering solutions in this arena.
- Unified Communications: What’s Available Now? Marty led a panel of two well-established suppliers (Mary Dunlop from Avaya and Tony Rybczynski from Nortel) and two recent market entrants who bring new models to the marketplace (Nick Fera, CEO of Parlano, and Vivek Khuller, CEO of DiVitas Networks).
All three of these sessions were very well attended, and most of the attendees were end users, with a scattering of systems integrators, consultants, and venture capitalists. The audience questions concentrated on definitions, applications, and ROI.
The Exhibition Guide listed 34 companies who included themselves under the unified communications category. Four were core providers—Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and Polycom. Marty and I did the circuit of the other 30 companies on the list and, in general, when we asked about their “UC capabilities or offerings” we got back blank stares, then a comment along the lines of “you should talk to the marketing folks.” More proof that this is the early days for UC in many companies, but everyone feels like they need to have a story—UC is increasingly viewed as a “next hot thing.”
One of the more important of the UC announcements came from Microsoft, which announced that 12 companies, representing 90 percent of the installed voice communications systems, have agreed to support their interoperability specification for OCS 2007. The list includes nine telephony system vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Ericsson, Genesys, Mitel, NEC, Nortel and Siemens), and three companies that sell gateways (AudioCodes, Dialogic and Quintum Technologies).
This announcement promises a pathway for enterprises who want to continue leveraging their legacy equipment while migrating to a UC-enabled, desktop-oriented environment. The arrangements with the gateway companies offer the potential for important connection opportunities into the PSTN. How will all this play out? Is it just for show? Or will new directions emerge and, if so, how will they affect the emerging industry structure? Stay tuned.
In summary, UC made a credible showing at a show that doesn’t have it as a focus. The fact that the UC sessions were so well attended in this, their first appearance on the Interop agenda, is important. Perhaps UC is just content filling the network pipes, but my sense is that the enterprise customers who attended were eager to learn more about the concepts, the applications, and the justification for unified communications. Even at a “networks” show.
What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@vanguard.net or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
Don Van Doren
Vanguard Communications and UCStrategies.com
Visitors can sign up to receive the newsletter by going to the UC eWeekly site -- http://voicecon.com/unified-communications/