The big news from today was Microsoft's announcement of Release 2 of Office Communications Server (OCS), but there was plenty going on all day as we crammed tutorials, keynotes and exhibits into a lovely autumn Tuesday in the Netherlands.
The big news from today was Microsoft's announcement of Release 2 of Office Communications Server (OCS), but there was plenty going on all day as we crammed tutorials, keynotes and exhibits into a lovely autumn Tuesday in the Netherlands.You can read Allan Sulkin's rundown of the details of the OCS announcement, and his analysis of the significance of this step, here. In the Amsterdam keynote session, Eric Swift of Microsoft demo-ed some of the cooler functions like IM integration with business applications and one-click desktop sharing out of an IM session. And he made it clear that Microsoft will continue to aggressively position its approach as the one that will lead to a fundamental change in the way voice is handled in the enterprise. Swift characterized R2 as "optimizing voice and conferencing," and promised that future releases will deliver unspecified "complete software powered voice for all...really making the PBX obsolete."
Now, on one level, Microsoft has been promising to make the PBX obsolete for the last couple of years, ever since none other than Eric Swift gave a talk at VoiceCon Orlando 2006 in which he approvingly cited a Gartner projection characterizing the PBX as "an architectural dead end." They've made no bones about it.
On the other hand, that projection seemed like a shot across the bow two and a half years ago, and today, it's more or less conventional wisdom. Don't believe me? Go find yourself a half-dozen marketing folks from different vendors and ask them to tell you about their company's PBX. If one of those marketeers allows the term "PBX" to stand unchallenged, I'd be shocked.
There are a few complications, one of them being named Cisco Systems. Cisco has long shunned the term "PBX" even as it shot to the top of the pack by selling, well, PBXs. But now comes Cisco WebEx Connect, which takes a much more expansive view of the interaction of various voice functionalities scattered throughout service provider and enterprise networks and mashed up via APIs and SOA. So depending on how the WebEx Connect play turns out, Cisco could be taking its own route to, if not rendering the PBX obsolete, at least offering a compelling alternative.
But I want to return to the other portion of Eric Swift's closing remarks--the part about "complete software-powered voice for all." That's what everyone says they want, and the benefits are obvious. But there is going to be a cost, and it won't be trivial. Eric Swift told the crowd here in Amsterdam that "The pace that we can innovate in a software platform is very fast." And he said it like that was a good thing.
But as Gary Audin has been pointing out ever since the migration to software started, frequent software releases are not necessarily compatible with the goal of maintaining a stable, reliable real-time communications network. Even if those releases bring you new and exciting capabilities, they could add other forms of excitement that you could just as easily do without.
So something will have to give here, because ultimately it's undeniable that communications is going to software, and away from sturdy, stable--too stable, for some people's tastes--hardware. The state of the economy throws the whole question of timing up in the air, but it's coming, so be ready.
