I read Nancy Jamison's report on Lotusphere and I wanted to follow up with my own thoughts from the conference and what it means for the industry that most of us cover. While some of you may read "the death of telephony" and disagree, I do believe that telephony, as we know it, needs to die in its current form to accelerate UC and CEBP adoption and I'll outline why.First of all, I must say there's very little sign of an economic slowdown at the conference. Unlike some of the other conferences through December and January, IBM reported that attendance from the user community was up 2% -- a remarkable achievement considering many companies have slashed travel budgets. Add in BlueMan Group opening the show and then a quick speech from Dan Aykroyd and it created an environment that I haven't felt from a show since prior to the economy slowing down.
I think this just goes to show just how strategic collaboration has become to corporations. Providing the right access to the right user community as fast as possible is absolutely strategic to organizations and the mood and atmosphere at the conference indicated that. What was also made clear from the content of the conference and much of the feedback from the audience at the conference is that UC is a small subset of a company's overall collaboration strategy. The main theme of Lotusphere conference was collaboration, but included topics like how to leverage Web2.0 applications, e-mail platforms, content management systems, portal software, mashups, office productivity tools and other applications to improve a company's collaboration strategy.
The other issue that's becoming abundantly clear is that the expertise required to win in this market long term is in software integration and not in telephony expertise. I've made this argument before but I really do believe that, over time, telephony as we know it becomes less and less important as the text message- and Facebook-driven younger generation makes its way into the workforce. We've got tons of consumer survey data at Yankee Group that shows, when given a choice, the 25 and under crowd prefers almost any communications method to voice. I'm not saying voice doesn't remain an important communications tool, but it's one of many communications tools today, not the only one like in days past. Voice, like other forms of communications, will become embedded into mainstream corporate applications, making voice ubiquitous and easier to use, but voice will be deployed as an application service, not a stand alone application.
So what does this mean for the communications industry? IBM and Microsoft have clearly focused product direction and innovation with application integration across their software suites in mind. They approach the market slightly differently, IBM much more "PBX vendor" friendly, but ultimately both paths lead to the same place. Communications infrastructure becomes a commodity that sits below the software layer. Product leadership will be driven by developer support, openness and adherence to standards. Unlike days past, having 800+ features and your own phones isn't going to be the criteria for winning or losing deals. I know it's conventional wisdom that phones do drive a lot of phone system sales, and they have in the past. The fact is, though, that corporate desk phones get used less and less every day. Many users I talk to say they really only use their desk phones to pick up voicemail (unless they have UM, then the phone sits idle). With the smartphones getting more feature rich and the quality of mobile networks improving, we're not far from the day when workers have a laptop and mobile phone to work with, and all the stuff on the desk is gone. Even for many task based workers, having the phone capability built into the PC allows for better integration to the other tools that the user needs, creating a more productive environment.
Looking at the vendor landscape, IBM and Microsoft have the installed base on the application and collaboration front to leverage that into UC leadership unless they totally botch the next couple of years, which I don't see. Cisco has a huge installed base, and the WebEx platform gives them a unique differentiator as companies look to push much of this functionality into the cloud. Avaya, because of all the work they've done with DevConnect, also seems poised to take advantage of this transition, but they will need to build their own platform but also find a way to work into IBM and Microsoft's platforms.
So that creates four main vendors to serve the future needs of the industry as communications becomes an application component. As for the rest of the vendors, I think a couple will survive as vertical or regional specialists (like Mitel, NEC, etc). The majority of the telephony industry though will continue to get smaller and eventually disappear. Think about it this way. We're just at the tip of this transition and many of them are already struggling.
The theme from this years Lotusphere was "resonance," and resonance can create harmony when many objects resonate at the same frequency. This is true when talking about the harmony IBM is creating across its own suite. Resonance can also be terribly disruptive when things resonate at different frequencies. That's definitely the case when looking at the strategies of the software oriented vendors versus the rest of the industry. Communications deployed everywhere creates a much larger market opportunity for everyone. Its just that most vendors haven't got their products aligned correctly.
