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Crashing the Gate at the Text Party

One of my greatest concerns with UC&C vendors is that they set their performance expectations too low. They seem content to compete with one another while ignoring the real competition, which is now coming from the consumer and startup sectors.

So Cisco seems content if Spark beats out Unify's Circuit and Avaya's Zang Spaces, while Slack clobbers them all and none of them even make the cut in Gartner's "Social Software for the Workplace Magic Quadrant." One place we can see this achievement gap is in the all-important area of text.

For my money, text is the most important communications medium to come along in the past 20 years. As the volume of texts has skyrocketed, it has had a direct (negative) impact on voice calls, voice messages, emails, and incomplete voice calls pre-call "pinging for people." While some users might be satisfied with having a half dozen different apps to communicate with different texting communities, integrating text will quickly become as much a requirement as integrating email accounts and inboxes on a smartphone. This will be a challenge for UC&C vendors whose text capabilities are for the most part on the outside looking in.

From SMS to WeChat
Friedhelm Hillebrand, a telecom engineer, is credited with coming up with the idea of short messaging service (SMS) in 1984 while working at Deutsche Telekom; Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja introduced the first commercial SMS offering in 1994. Of course, as most UC texting is done via desktops and laptops, its real precursor might be the AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, introduced in May 1977.

For a long while, SMS had been the goose that laid the golden eggs for mobile operators. They could charge $0.10 to $0.15 per text ($0.25 for a multimedia messaging service), and the service cost almost nothing to provide -- they carried SMS messages on their SS7 signaling networks, and because the SMS messages were low priority, they could get there when they got there. The other great feature was that any mobile phone user could text any other mobile phone user because SMS was standards-based. However, SMS technology stagnated and other texting options appeared; in the U.S., SMS usage peaked in 2012 and dropped about 18% by 2015.

BlackBerry spurred the first big advance in mobile texting in 2005 with the introduction of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). While BBM's functionality took mobile texting to the next level, it also shifted texting off the SS7 network and onto the cellular data service.

Most importantly, BlackBerry rewrote the rules of the game with BBM and left the any-to-any idea in the dust. Given its strength in the market at the time, BlackBerry was able to adopt a walled garden strategy (eventually opening up BBM in 2013, by which time nobody cared). BBM required users to pair with one another using the BlackBerry PIN before they could exchange BBMs. Once you'd cleared the velvet rope, however, you got group text, delivery confirmation, and real-time indication that your correspondent was typing.

For the brief moment that BlackBerry was on top of the mobile world, BBM was the gold standard in texting. Then Apple got into it.

Apple introduced iMessage at the 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference as part of iOS 5 for the iPhone and iPad, and like BlackBerry did with BBM, it made iMessage an exclusive club for iOS users. While iMessage delivered many of the same features as BBM, it added a few more. Most importantly, iMessage integrated with traditional SMS on the same screen rather than having them in two different apps; you could also integrate AIM, Google, Yahoo, and other messaging accounts.

Best of all, an iPhone user didn't need to know if the intended text recipient was another Apple user. All the iPhone texter had to do was just send the text. If it showed up in a blue bubble the recipient was an Apple user, and if not, the text showed up in a green bubble. Of course, you only got the cool features like delivery notification and real-time typing indication when texting with other iMessage users.

Apple left everyone else behind in 2012 when it released OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and introduced iMessage on the Mac. With this, if both your Mac and your iPhone/iPad were logged into the same iCloud account, you could send and receive iMessages on your Mac and the messages would show up on all of your devices. Things got even better in 2014 with the introduction of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), providing the ability to sync your iPhone with your Mac, and send and receive SMS messages through the iMessage app on the Mac.

In the meantime, two former Yahoo! developers founded WhatsApp in 2009; Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19.3 billion five years later. Like BBM and iMessage, the WhatsApp messaging app supported group texting, typing indication, multimedia transmissions, and all parties in a group received pings when someone's status changed. It, too, was a closed club, available only to those who downloaded the WhatsApp app. The good news was WhatsApp offered versions for iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone, and even BlackBerry; it has since added Windows and Mac support.

Facebook introduced Facebook Messenger in 2011, and Tencent launched WeChat in 2012, rounding out the list of messaging heavyweights.

The result of all of this was that different texting communities formed around the various texting apps, all of which were essentially walled gardens. With the exception of iMessage, none interfaced with SMS, the least common denominator in the mobile texting world.

GSMA 'Joyns' In
Feeling left out of the action, cellular standards body GSMA started looking at what it could do to make its SMS offering more attractive before (pardon the pun) its goose was cooked. In 2007, GSMA came up with a plan it called Rich Communications Services (RCS), a set of enhancements for mobile network services. In essence, it looked to do a lot of what BBM did in 2005 and Apple and WhatsApp introduced subsequent to that. That would include group chat, content sharing, typing indication, file transfer, geolocation exchange, and even presence in its Enhanced Phonebook.

The development took some time, and it wasn't until 2012 that Metro PCS introduced the first RCS-based messaging service in the U.S. under the GSMA-coined product name, joyn. Sprint launched its Messaging Plus RCS-based service in 2013, and RCS is also the basis for T-Mobile's Advanced Messaging offering launched in 2015. Unfortunately, only a limited number of smartphones, including the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge and the LG G4, support RCS. The iPhone does not. The big question is what impact RCS-based messaging might have on established walled gardens.

For sure there is a lot of speculation in the chat rooms about whether Apple is going to integrate RCS with iMessage the same way it integrated SMS. Given Apple's penchant for differentiating its products from others, I can't see it doing any favors for the mobile operators. I also have a hard time envisioning why an iPhone user would dump iMessage in favor of this.

UC&C Stumbling About
So, where were the UC&C vendors while all of this was going on? It seems like they were sitting out in a field somewhere wondering where the party was.

Sure, Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, and the rest all have texting capabilities, but they are the most hopelessly isolated of all. Even with their support for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) capabilities, they can't text to iMessage, WhatsApp, AIM, SMS (without a plug-in) or to each other! And to text on the go, you have to use their woeful mobile apps. The only thing worse than having a closed group is having a closed group with nobody in it!

UC federation provider NextPlane does offer texting federation among UC platforms, and external federation to AIM and Yahoo -- is this like "nostalgia week?" NextPlane doesn't integrate with SMS, though some of the platforms like Cisco's and Avaya's do offer a third-party SMS cloud gateway service through Webtext, but that appears to be geared toward contact centers and not at linking their text capabilities to SMS. Avaya now has its own SMS interface through Zang. At least the availability of offerings like Twilio, Tropo and the other communications platform-as-a-service vendors can get them into the last decade -- yippee SMS, the only mobile texting option that's shrinking!

Unified communications was supposed to be about communicating, so how did the UC&C suppliers wind up as isolated bit players in the most significant new communications medium in the 21st century? The fact that all the most popular services are exclusive clubs certainly works against the UC&C providers, as none of those guys are in the club -- and apparently not influential enough to sway the selection committee.

Even though they are locked out of the big communities, most of them don't even offer a way to exchange texts with SMS, the only real ubiquitous texting network in the mobile space. Maybe working with the likes of Twilio, Tropo (Cisco), Kandy (Genband), Nexmo (Vonage), Plivo, TokBox and the other CPaaS providers could at least get them SMS connectivity.

Texting is big, as we heard in many of the presentations at Enterprise Connect, but the UC&C vendors appear to be missing this boat. At least now you know why all of your users sitting in front of their desktop computers with the big screens and full keyboards are texting away on their smartphones.

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