Gurdeep Singh Pall wasted little time in offering up Microsoft's response to yesterday's announcement that Cisco is partnering with Google for enterprise UC. After rattling off the names of various Cisco and Google products, the head of Microsoft's Lync/Skype team said, "The fact that this is going to be available on Chromebook is not very exciting to me, because this is about simplicity."
Complexity and the gap between people's work and life experiences of communications were a major focus of Singh Pall's Wednesday Enterprise Connect keynote. He stressed simplicity, with an emphasis on the end user, and the way that more advanced systems can drive communications toward a simpler experience for the end user.
With people's work and life identities merging more and more, users want to be able to use the same interface for both these roles, he said. Not only will this make end users more comfortable, it will also help the enterprise, he pointed out. As an example, the fact that so many people use Skype in their personal lives means they're ready to use the technology without any intervention from IT. "It means you have instant training for everyone who joins your company," he said.
The world of end user devices will also evolve with the rise of wearable technology and the Internet of Things, Singh Pall said. And he alluded to the two years he was away from the Lync organization, during which time he worked with Microsoft's artificial intelligence projects. "Everything is going to be impacted by machine- and artificial intelligence," he said.
"Ten years ago, it was interesting to integrate communications into [Microsoft] Office," Singh Pall said. That was just the beginning; what it's evolving into is an "Intelligent substrate that runs through all of the applications you're using,"
Singh Pall gave an example of what he was talking about: Suppose you have a meeting in 15 minutes with a guy named Joe. You go into your contact list to call him, but since his last name is Whittinghale, you've got to scroll through all the Joes you do business with, just to reach his name. What should happen, Singh Pall said, is that your calendar should be able to talk with your contact list dynamically, so that the entire system knows that the Joe you're most likely to be interested in is the guy you're supposed to talk to in 15 minutes, and so his name would pop to the beginning when you do the search function in your contact list.
That, as Singh Pall said, is just a simple example, but it's a fairly elegant one, and something that's easy for people to grasp.
Other trends that Singh Pall predicted include video "everywhere." He pointed out that, besides carrying 1/3 of the international voice traffic in a year, Skype also does 300 billion minutes [corrected from earlier version--ed.] of video in a year. Video isn't about rooms, he said; "it's about doing video wherever."
Putting it all together, Singh Pall repeated his proclamation from last month's Lync Conference--that the era of Unified Communications is over, and it's time to launch the era of Universal Communications. With Lync experiencing the kind of growth it's seen--38 quarters of double-digit revenue growth, penetration into 60% of enterprises--Microsoft is clearly the biggest force pushing the industry to its next level.
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