What better place to talk about Unified Communications interoperability than at Interop? Here in Las Vegas, Marty Parker kicked off our Collaboration track with a session focused on the state and prospects for UC interoperability, and one thing that became clear is that the most immediate interoperability challenge is, in fact, the one most people more or less take for granted: Interoperability between new and old voice systems.
"Voice integration [between legacy and new systems] is the top request from our customers," Cisco's Wade Hamblin told the audience. "There's still a lot of legacy out there." Frank Fender of Siemens acknowledged that he's seeing the same need, as did Jamie Stark of Microsoft, who pointed to the "dozens" of gateway products that Microsoft supports as a key to integrating circuit-switched systems with Lync Unified Communications.
The wild card on the panel was Hugh Finnan of Google, representing the company's Chrome browser unit, and advocating for WebRTC as a key enabler for the vision of interoperability that Google espouses in this space. Hugh summed up that vision as one where the priority is simple functionality, where a user can use the same client everywhere, log into their various accounts (email, documents, voice), and have a consistent experience. He decried the idea that there should be a need for client support and upgrades: "You shouldn't have to even do that," he said. "Just have one piece of software, and that's your browser."
That's the vision, and it was countered by Jamie Stark, who summed up Microsoft's vision of the ecosystem: "We don't look at this as a topic of interoperability," he said. "We look upon this as a set of features we deliver." In other words, Lync is the platform over which any number of features can be delivered. On the back end, that may be a complex call routing scheme, and on the client side it may be an integration with a line of business application. That back-end routing application or front-end client application may not be produced by Microsoft, but it's all provided over Lync.
That role for the third-party developer works with the Google/WebRTC model as well, Hugh Finnan said, tossing off the fanciful idea of, "I want to build an application to see how my cat is doing, because he's home alone all day." The idea is, this would now run just through a browser plugin, nothing more needed.
As far as other areas where interoperability is relevant, the need is widespread--from IM federation to video--but nobody really made a convincing case that there's much plug-and-play about the state of the art today. Still, there were some interesting comments in the wrapup. Alan Klein, who represented Acme Packet on the panel, cited areas where open APIs and SDKs could yield beneficial integrations for enterprise communications--he mentioned manageability and analytics, fault prevention and security as areas where independent software developers could come up with solutions that would be valuable for enterprise systems, assuming they could be integrated cost-efficiently.
The other intriguing closing comment--one upon which there was no time for elaboration--came from Jamie Stark of Microsoft:
"We bought Skype last year and we're gonna make it awesome."
