A Fair Point
One of the commenters on yesterday's D'Ambrosio story makes a good point: "Companies like Avaya/Nortel/Cisco are comfortable being considered 'legacy voice' against Microsoft and IBM.....as long as you label THOSE companies as LEGACY software providers. Let's run real time applications in Vista with proprietary protocols.... that will work..."
You know, I can't argue much with that. If "legacy voice" is meant to connote proprietary, inflexible (also reliable, high-quality, of course), then it's fair to drop a perjorative "legacy" modifier in front of "enterprise software," suggesting all the things about business software that could pose problems for its use in Unified Communications.
You could argue that it's more appropriate to put the weight of the "legacy" burden on voice because the voice model is moving toward software, not vice versa. On the other hand, as long as the negative aspects of legacy software remain, that migration actually isn't likely to happen to a significant degree.
The whole semantic argument here kind of points out the straw-man nature of the way the 2 sides market against each other. It also points to the way forward: Business-critical applications, including but not limited to voice, increasingly have to be written with performance characteristics across IP networks as a foremost concern. That's happening now, but it has to happen more. That means application developers, network infrastructure specialists, and telecom experts will have to work much more closely together than ever before.
If they do, they'll leave a worthwhile legacy to the next generation.
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