There's every reason to believe we won't get true interoperability from the vendors. The question is whether there's a way around them.

One of the most important supposed benefits of Unified Communications is that it promises to improve productivity in both hard- and soft-benefit cases. Eliminating "human latency" to save time for people is a "soft benefit," as you don’t really know where the saved time is going; yet intuitively it makes sense that streamlining the way people work has to make them more productive. At the same time, you can quantify benefits like time to production, time to market, etc.—and these savings are not only measurable, but potentially very large.

And while securing these benefits within your enterprise could be a big plus, many enterprises could multiply the benefits if they could extend UC out into their very large, complex, and diverse supply chain. Earlier week, UC expert Russell Bennett wrote about how Boeing, as one example, stands to drive not only savings but actual new revenue by accelerating the supply chain.

Russell’s post is entitled, "What is UC Federation and Why Should I Care?" and he does a great job of answering both questions. The problem is that, as analyst David Yedwab notes in the Comments, Federation is inherently limited: It lets different enterprises collaborate on a common system--but it has to be the same vendor's system on both ends. What's lacking is what’s always lacking--multivendor interoperability.

Clearly this puts a severe crimp in the ability of UC to really benefit large enterprises that need to collaborate with partners, suppliers, etc. To take the example that Russell uses, Boeing uses thousands of suppliers to source an airplane made up of 367,000 discrete parts. What are the odds that Boeing is going to get all of these companies onto the Microsoft Lync platform that it uses? Well, the odds are somewhat better because it's Microsoft, which not only is widely deployed across enterprises and is aggressively pushing Lync upgrades—but they've also got a strong cloud play with Office 365. But still, plenty of suppliers will be on other systems.

But maybe the cloud is the place to look for interoperability. We're seeing a model emerge in video, where Blue Jeans Networks is using an MCU in the cloud to let various endpoints from different manufacturers talk to one another. Why couldn't a service provider build or buy a UC middleware platform like Avaya ACE and offer that as a service, to connect disparate UC systems across user organizations?

What this really comes back to is an idea that we saw talked about last year, just before Microsoft's acquisition of Skype pretty much put a damper on the idea: There needs to be a new public network, something that ties together multitudes of endpoint systems and delivers IP-based communications services to enterprises with relatively consistent functionality. An independent Skype might have had a chance to play that role; but competitors will balk at giving a Microsoft Skype such a position.

One-off interoperability may deliver value to large enterprises, but the real breakthrough will come when there's true multivendor interoperability. There's every reason to believe we won't get that level of interoperability from the vendors themselves. The question is whether there's a way around them.