Well, they got it done--pretty much. At VoiceCon Orlando, Eric Swift of Microsoft and Pat Galvin of IBM shook hands and promised to deliver federation between Office Communications Server (OCS) and Sametime. This morning, at VoiceCon San Francisco, the pair returned to the VoiceCon stage and announced that the job was done.
The interoperability testing that the two companies just completed will cover only inter-domain federation, not intra-domain (for an explanation, see this feature article). That's not a small distinction. Today's VoiceCon UC Summit, at which the agreement was announced, also featured Jonathan Rosenberg of Cisco, who has been one of the leads on IETF work toward intra-domain federation. That's critical because, as Lawrence Byrd of Avaya pointed out on today's panel, intra-domain relationships--i.e., between multi-vendor equipment within a single enterprise--are much more critical to business than inter-domain, which connects different enterprises. Inter-domain is obviously useful, but intra-domain is what would allow enterprises to build multi-vendor, presence-enabled UC systems, as Christian Szpilfogel of Mitel noted in today's session.
Both Pat Galvin of IBM and Eric Swift of Microsoft said that the new inter-domain presence federation standards compliance will be available in products within the next few months.
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