IBM, like Cisco, is trying to shift the ground on which the communications/collaboration battles are fought.

Our Virtual VoiceCon event this week had a session devoted to prospects for cloud-based communications systems, and the IBM speaker, Apratim Purakayastha, showed some interesting slides about where enterprises see value in cloud-based services.Not surprisingly, the key motivation is to save money:

A.P. also presented a slide showing that IBM expects strong growth at all levels of the cloud business:

About those acronyms: IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service; PaaS is Platform as a Service; SaaS is, as you know, Software as a Service; and BPaaS is Business Process as a Service. I don't want to get bogged down in the many different acronyms, and frankly I think the Cloud Computing folks would be wise if they didn't, either. We in the communications world are still semi-outside the Cloud world, and the kinds of fine distinctions that may be meaningful to companies basing their entire business models on one approach to Cloud and not another--those distinctions matter less to enterprises (and vendors) that are simply trying to figure out how to use off-premises capabilities as a more efficient replacement for CPE.

When we got to Q&A in the Cloud session, Jacques Pavleyni of IBM noted that, in his experience, "a public cloud tends to feature discrete pieces of functionality, as opposed to more monolithic or large bucket of application functionality, which is what you normally see in the hosted model." He called on the example of Google Wave, where the user aggregates pieces of functionality that he or she requires, regardless of what application that function resides in. He called this "an end-user mashup, almost."

That seemed to me like both a great idea and a recipe for confusion and strife. Having an "app store" model for your Unified Communications would be great--and would drive IT people crazy. It'd be a huge policy mess for enterprises to enforce, both from a budgeting standpoint as well as security/compliance.

On another point: During his presentation, A.P. discussed LotusLive, IBM's own cloud-based offering for Web Conferencing, Collaboration and eMail. It turned out to be a really timely discussion, coming just a few weeks after Cisco's big Collaboration launch. It struck me that IBM, which introduced LotusLive at LotusSphere this past January, had beaten Cisco to the punch, or maybe Cisco, with its collaboration announcement, had validated the LotusLive vision.

They both really did it for the same reason (or at least a reason): To challenge Microsoft. IBM made a big deal at Lotusphere about customers they claimed had switched from Exchange to Lotus Notes; and Cisco's entry into the email marketplace was likewise an attempt to counter Microsoft's entry into the voice market that Cisco partly controls. Both Microsoft rivals know that letting Exchange rule the email world unchallenged is an invitation for Office Communications Server (OCS) to grab a toehold in the communications world and eventually seize a significant share of the voice and collaboration market.

In previous No Jitter posts, both Zeus Kerravala and Melanie Turek suggested, in analyzing the Cisco announcement, that email is one enterprise application that's ripe for outsourcing to the cloud. That IBM is continuing to make this a key part of its Cloud pitch is a sign that they, like Cisco, are trying to shift the ground on which the communications/collaboration battles are fought.IBM, like Cisco, is trying to shift the ground on which the communications/collaboration battles are fought.