If you want to know why the PBX model is not the way of the future, said Avaya’s Phil Edholm, look at the middle initial: "B", as in, "branch." The idea of a device hanging off of a telco access line, managing connections to desktops at a branch location, is an architecture that is going away.
"That's not a definition of communications that applies today or has for the last five years," Phil told the audience in today’s opening General Session, "UC in 2011: Myths, Realities and What Comes Next."
So what is the next platform? Edholm compared today's communications systems to the early days of the World Wide Web, with SIP taking the role that TCP/IP played in the early and mid-90s. What changed the world then was browsers, and what will change the communications world is what technology providers build on top of SIP to take advantage of the common underlying protocol.
Jim Burton of CTLink/UCStrategies, who co-moderated the session with Enterprise Connect GM Fred Knight, agreed: "A lot of this is the state of the industry, and we’re in an early state right now." However, an element of that "earliness" is the lack of interoperability, which Burton hammered on and encouraged the end users in the audience to do likewise when they meet with their strategic vendors. He asked audience members to applaud if they thought interoperability was important, and got a loud hand, contrasted with the silence that ensued when he asked the end users in the audience to applaud if they thought the vendors were delivering on interoperability.
Warren Barkley of Microsoft echoed this, saying standards are not enough, there have to be testing and certification programs.
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In the afternoon plenary session that I co-moderated with Michael Finneran, who developed our Mobility track and blogs on the subject at No Jitter, the question was how to make enterprise-oriented communications a part of a mobile end user experience that has already taken off without such enterprise orientation. Our panelists—from RIM, Siemens Enterprise, Sprint and Verizon—agreed that the cloud would play an important role in delivering secure applications to mobile users, and they promised that 4G would dramatically improve the experience of working on enterprise applications via the public cellular networks. Janet Schijns of Verizon even said that 4G would enable enterprises to start bringing down the cost of international roaming.
The 4G-to-cloud-based application link will effectively create what Schijns called the "personal WAN," i.e., "business class access" to applications from any device.
This was a high-level session to kick off the Mobility track at Enterprise Connect—these and many more issues will be tackled in depth over the course of the week, and we’ll keep following it in these daily reports.
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Those were the big sessions of the day, and they both packed nearly 1,000 people into our "small" keynote room. We move keynotes into the big space tomorrow, when we hear from Cisco, Avaya and Skype, as well as a panel of end users who’ll open the conference with a discussion of the question, "Is There a New Model for Enterprise Communications & Collaboration?" Attendance is up significantly this year, the show floor opens late this afternoon, and we’re expecting a big week. Watch your email in-box for this daily update through Thursday. You can also follow the Twittersphere’s ongoing take on Enterprise Connect by checking out #enterprisecon on Twitter.
