On the sixth day of UC the industry gave to me applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.
The true value of UC is in integration. UC is about integration of business applications and communications within the office and in mobility applications. In unified communications, it shouldn’t matter what the client is, as long as you can get to the information and applications that you want and need. Further, just like the proverbial duck sitting calmly on the water and paddling furiously underneath, that integration all happens underneath and users shouldn’t know about it. My day six wish is for UC applications to be as plug and play as email, in that we all have our own favorite email client, but we don’t care what our friends and colleagues have as long as when we hit send, they get the message. Of course, it would be nice if they all sent and received messages the same way so that everyone gets embedded pictures and you don’t have to click through eight forwarded envelopes to get to the joke (my own personal rant about my friends use of AOL).
Email is a good example of the evolution that is happening now, but is not yet finished. Twenty years ago we started with university messaging systems, and some corporate. I vividly remember using the IBM Profs system when I was at ROLM. I remember the message boards that were the precursor to what we do now on the Internet. Back then, very little email interoperated. Now, every email system and client works together, but it’s like pulling teeth to get it to do so (see AOL rant). With the blossoming of the concept of unified communications we know what we want to do, but in many cases, particularly when vendors try to unify siloed applications together, we seem to be back at square one.
Some vendors, such as Interactive Intelligence, whose software-based applications were built from the ground up to work together, have a leg up on the integration front. But even those vendors have interoperability issues if they step outside the confines of their system and want to do things like have presence information from another vendor. By the end of 2008 I hope we have taken giant steps in being able to take video conferencing, instant messaging, presence, and other UC apps and have them be as plug and play as email is today. (PS – interoperability between vendors is a whole separate wish).