Gurdeep Singh Pall used his opening keynote at this year's Lync Conference to make the case for a new UC: Universal--not just Unified--Communications.
It may not be surprising that Singh Pall brings a broader, even grander vision upon his return to the Lync unit. He spent the past two years working on Artificial Intelligence projects within Microsoft, and he noted how much enterprise communications has changed in that time--from a world where room video conferencing was still a high-end, high-cost installation, to a world where Lync room video systems--announced at this event a year ago--have become one of the few hot technologies in a market space that's cooled considerably.
Singh Pall also described how the work of analytics and Bayesian prediction--the sort of analysis that Amazon and other retailers have become famous for as they analyze customer behavior trends--will eventually make its way into communications systems. In practice, Singh Pall said, this means that your communications system should know that, if you routinely call a customer or other contact at the same general time, with the same general approach, that system should be able to present you with the means to launch that communications, with less intervention from you--i.e., less scrolling through contact lists or searching for documents.
That's just one of the impacts of the mega-trends that Singh Pall called out as a driver of his concept of Universal Communications. These mega-trends consisted of mostly more-familiar societal and technology trends: Changing work-life balances; social networking; constantly-improving devices (including the impact of wearable technology); changing uses of synchronous vs. asychronous modes of communication; and the rise of the cloud.
Take these trends together, he said, and you wind up with implications including the need for consistent user experience across devices; the growing use of video; global reach via the cloud; and the aforementioned rise of context via big-data-style analytics.
That's the broad vision that Gurdeep Singh Pall laid out--so how will the Skype-Lync organization get there? Last year was one of big steps: The introduction of room video and porting Lync onto all major mobile platforms represented major advances in making Lync a platform that could serve all of an enterprise user's communications. This year's advances seem to be more about building on the new product announcements, as well as building on the continued strong adoption growth of Lync in the enterprise.
In the demo portion of the Lync Conference keynote today, Derek Burney showed some of these new additions, that Microsoft says will be in customers' hands this year:
* Support for Android tablets
* Interoperability between Lync Server and Tandberg VTC systems
* Video calling between Lync and Skype--an element that was notably missing when the initial Lync-Skype federation was announced at last year's Lync Conference.
* Browser extensibility with voice and video content.
That last point is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it made for a good demo. Burney pointed his browser at a website for a healthcare provider, went through a series of text-based Q&As about a purported medical complaint that escalated to an interactive text chat session, and from there to a video session with a doctor who diagnosed the condition and suggested modes of treatment.
Of geek interest is what was going on under the technology covers here. The feature used something called JLync, which Burney described as a Javascript wrapper around Web APIs, which enabled the website to deliver that interactive multimedia session inside the browser.
So if you're like me, you think to yourself, "Website...Javascript...in-browser multimedia...sounds a lot like WebRTC." So in a follow-up briefing, I had a chance to ask Microsoft's Giovanni Mezgec how JLync relates to WebRTC, and he said the Microsoft feature is not meant to pre-empt or replace WebRTC. Microsoft is still participating in the WebRTC standards effort, he said--though it must be noted that Microsoft continues to push its own CU-RTC WEB take on the standard.
Giovanni Mezgec said that it was important for Microsoft to get these capabilities out there while work on the WebRTC standard progresses--"what we cared about is, it [JLync] just worked."
The final two 2014 deliverables announced in today's keynote related to Lync Online: The ability to make and receive PSTN calls from Lync Online (which Brian Riggs wrote about last year; and the ability to hold large conferences, upwards of 1,000 people.
The biggest news about Lync this year is hiding in plain sight: It's experiencing tremendous growth--however you measure it. When it comes to the activities taking place here in Las Vegas at the Lync Conference, it's about the return of the leader who built the Lync business, Gurdeep Singh Pall, and the vision he's crafting for the next generation of technology that Microsoft will be releasing into the market. And then there's the execution, in the form of filling out the product lines, making systems more manageable, and driving adoption and usage across platforms.
Gurdeep Singh Pall will be delivering one of the keynote addresses at Enterprise Connect Orlando. Register today!
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