By Fred Knight Lotusphere continues through Thursday, but I'm getting ready to return home. So, what follows are some thoughts/observations about IBM's efforts in Unified Communications, after a day and a half of sitting in sessions and press conferences, walking the show floor, wandering the halls and chatting with attendees.
By Fred Knight Lotusphere continues through Thursday, but I'm getting ready to return home. So, what follows are some thoughts/observations about IBM's efforts in Unified Communications, after a day and a half of sitting in sessions and press conferences, walking the show floor, wandering the halls and chatting with attendees.1. Unified Communications is not a peripheral topic at Lotusphere, it is a core area of focus. During many conversations with IBM about its UC program over the past year, I always wondered how much UC really mattered to the company. No longer. UC plays a central role in Lotus's future, and IBM's customers seem to agree -- the UC-oriented sessions were jammed.
2. Unlike Microsoft, which is absolutely up front about wanting OCS to replace PBXs, IBM is, for now, sticking with a more tactful approach. It emphasizes partnerships with the PBX vendors and announced four more today:
* Cisco will sell Lotus Sametime along with its own UC portfolio through its Advanced Specialized partner channel, which has more than 1200 participants world-wide.
* Nortel will sell and integrate Sametime as part of its UC solution, through both direct and indirect channels. Nortel's VOIP and multimedia capabilities along with Sametime also will be available directly on the IBM System i platform. (3Com has a similar deal with IBM regarding the System i.)
* Ericsson will integrate its MX-ONE platform with Sametime, enabling calls to be managed from a conference call, desktop or mobile phone.
* NEC has come out with the UNIVERGE gateway module for Sametime, which enables users to see a contact's telephone presence and then deliver click-to-call capability from Sametime, a web conference or Notes email message.
* Nortel will sell and integrate Sametime as part of its UC solution, through both direct and indirect channels. Nortel's VOIP and multimedia capabilities along with Sametime also will be available directly on the IBM System i platform. (3Com has a similar deal with IBM regarding the System i.)
* Ericsson will integrate its MX-ONE platform with Sametime, enabling calls to be managed from a conference call, desktop or mobile phone.
* NEC has come out with the UNIVERGE gateway module for Sametime, which enables users to see a contact's telephone presence and then deliver click-to-call capability from Sametime, a web conference or Notes email message.
3. Still, I can't help but wonder whether IBM's embrace of PBX vendors will, at some point, become a strangle hold. If IBM continues to make nice with the PBX vendors but customers actually start deploying Microsoft OCS as their core communications platform, won't IBM have to respond? Moreover, enterprises are already shifting investment from desktop phones to softphones and mobile phones. As this shift in spending continues, the PBX vendors' grip on their customers will grow weaker, opening up opportunities for both Microsoft and IBM. When it comes to PBXs, Microsoft took off the gloves about a year ago; eventually, won't IBM as well?
4. UC features and functions are still primitive. Click-to call? Give me a break. I know it takes a lot of effort for the vendors to build easy-to-use front ends/user interfaces and I'm not minimizing their value. But the real gains will come from tying those nifty UC interfaces to back-office operations, to document and content management and to the mainstream applications environment. The market needs to see real payoff from UC....enough already with the screen pops and click-to-call demos!
5. UC and Web 2.0: After attending a Web 2.0 Summit in fall, 2006, I wrote that UC and Web 2.0 were an inevitable combination . I focused my time at Lotusphere this week on UC, but managed to slip into a few sessions devoted to social networking, and they too were packed. We hear and read much about why the "millennials" -- those tech-savvy 20-somethings that are coming into the workforce -- will change the workplace environment.
Setting aside the question of whether businesses should continue coddling these snivelers, there are sound business reasons for enterprises to move toward social networking and related technologies. Simply put, they make it easier for people to collaborate - to work together, to share ideas, content and resources. Both UC and Web 2.0 suffer from an overabundance of hype, but both are grounded in meaningful change. Hopefully, the noise level will soon subside and enable meaningful alignment between the two to occur.
As I noted in one of yesterday's posts, Lotus is morphing into a more multi-dimensional environment, one in which users spend a large portion of their day, and UC plays a central role in that evolution. All of the IBM execs I spoke with emphasized how early it was in the migration to UC; that said, they also never missed an opportunity to mention that customers like NY Bank Mellon, Colgate, Prudential UK and others had begun to make the move. UC and Lotus's expanded potential has clearly got the IBM'ers psyched, and the Lotusphere attendees seemed genuinely interested in learning what UC was all about - what's real and what's not. Lotusphere primed the pump; it's all about execution now.
