For the past several years the market for business communications solutions could be described as an arms race. One vendor shakes up the market with a low-end IP-based telephony system, causing all other vendors to develop low-end IP-based telephony solutions of their own. Another vendor scales up that IP telephony system and adds a full PBX feature set, VoIP security, branch office survivability, and other goodies, then others make their own IP telephony systems scalable, secure, fully featured, survivable, and otherwise goodies-rich. Someone jumps in with a presence and IM platform suitable for business use and integrated with its telephony platform, and soon everyone's got the same. Then major player start chucking around acronyms like CEBP, SOA, SIP, B2BUA, CSTA, CTI, UM, UC, FMC, and SMI … and faster than you can mutter WTF everyone else is doing it. (Ok, I made up SMI. I wanted to fit in social media integration in somewhere because you can't be a hip and with-it telecom blogger without slipping in a stray--but in the end pointless and self-serving--reference to social media.)
The result has been generally homogenous product portfolios across vendors that all offer a remarkably similar array of server-based telephony systems, unified messaging software, unified communications solutions, and conferencing, contact center and IVR platforms. Differentiation--true differentiation, differentiation in terms of there being clear haves and have-nots when it comes to business communications technology--has been increasingly rare.
But times they are a changin'.
With PBX systems becoming commoditized, corporate instant messaging software becoming table stakes, and unified messaging, mobility and SIP support completely ubiquitous, vendors are now starting to venture down roads that lead off into quite different directions.
I caught a glimpse of one of these roads at the Alcatel-Lucent conference last week at the intelligent Workload Distribution demo. As Sheila noted, Alcatel-Lucent reports an uptick in sales of this platform that that extends contact center-style routing, queuing, monitoring and reporting functionality into the enterprise. iWD is clear differentiator for Alcatel-Lucent. No other vendor (someone correct me if I'm wrong) has as comprehensive a solution that extends the best of contact center operations and analytics beyond the customer service environment and into the general enterprise. Another differentiator is in the works: a conferencing solution that Alcatel-Lucent is calling Immersive Communications. I've only seen slide-ware mock-ups of it so far, but I seem to recall hearings that it's up and working in some demo center in New Jersey. It apparently combines video conferencing, virtual world environments, and gestural control to create an online meeting experience that is not quite telepresence and not quite Second Life.
Alcatel-Lucent Immersive Communications
At Avaya differentiation is readily apparent in the much-vaunted Flare Experience, which presents a user interface for communications and conferencing applications found nowhere else in the industry. (What’s not unique about Flare is that everyone you conference with has pearly teeth, a perfect complexion, sculpted cheek bones, and beautiful shiny hair, like those in this screen shot. Having paged through endless marketing brochures I can assure you that everyone using video conferencing technology is as beautiful as a runway model. Just like me.)
Avaya Flare
Another clear differentiator for Avaya is web.alive, the virtual world environment that it inherited from Nortel (...and that a certain Avaya analyst relations rep who shall remain nameless is obsessing over). Of course there are other virtual world environments on the market, and a number of them are focused on business use in the same way web.alive is. But none of Avaya’s direct competitors in the telephony systems market has anything quite like this, which is enough to make my point here.
VXI, UCS, Quad, Pulse, umi, Flip.... I've already given a rundown of the differentiated products that are popping up in Cisco’s portfolio and differentiating its products from those of companies it competes with in the market for telephony systems and software. Add Intercompany Media Engine to mix, since no one else (at least no one else I'm aware of) is delivering a similar system to create peer-to-peer communications networks between businesses.
Unified communications software--namely OpenScape UC--available as a service via a third-party cloud service--namely Amazon EC2--is a clear competitive differentiator for Siemens Enterprise Communications. Or rather it will be when and if it’s made generally available. Lync Online and Office 365 will similarly differentiate Microsoft, considering that such a comprehensive set of cloud-based telephony, IM, collaboration and productivity apps plays to Microsoft's unique strengths. IBM's got Sametime Unified Telephony. ShoreTel has call-processing-on-a-switch. The list doesn’t exactly go on and on, but it's long enough to at least take note of.
I don't expect all of these differentiated products to succeed. In fact a great many of them are likely to fail. They require a vendor to break into adjacent markets that are occupied by a whole new set of competitors, some of which see the technology in question as the center ring under the big top, not a curious sideshow act. These differentiated products also tend fall well outside the comfort zone of telephony systems vendors' sales reps and resellers...and without their sustained support the new products will struggle to establish themselves. But it's heartening to see developers of telephony systems and software experiment with new ideas and new directions. Those that succeed have a chance to shape the direction of the market for the next few years.
