FMC AS THE SERVICE, MOBILE UC AS THE APP
The telecommunications industry tends to confuse services and applications. In my book, FMC is a service and UC is an application.
Do I hear a so what? Well, think about it for a moment. FMC allows you transition from wide area networks to local area networks and vice versa. Without FMC, the call would be dropped. So without FMC, youd also lose the presence of your colleagues: to get them back youd have to reconnect with the server. That may seem obvious, but as Doug Mohney of FierceVOIP recently wrote, a number of companies that were in the fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) world...are now reimagining/rebranding themselves into a Mobile Unified Communications camp. That makes sense, because even though UC is seen as the Next Big Thing, FMC is a prerequisite for a meaningful Mobile UC experience.
The close link between FMC and UC on a mobile device leads us to an interesting question. Should FMC vendors offer integrated solutions, or should they stay with their original core competence, the spin being that the customers can then select the optimum mobile UC offer along with the devices? In turn, that leads to the different requirements of enterprises and SMBs.
Businesses need FMC to ensure a seamless experience for their users. After all, the key to mobile UC is the ability for the user to stay connected to the resources they need while being mobile and moving between locations and networks. An example of UC functionality embedded at the application layer is the ability to extend PBX and desk phone functionality to, and be unified on, mobile phones. Mobile extensions enable mobile business users to have full desk phone functionality anywhere, including single number ring and identity, as well as common features such as transfer, conferencing, and voice mail.
Agito and DiVitas offer alternative FMC solutions and they have slightly different strategies. (V2.0 of the DiVitas Mobile UC interface is shown at right) Theyre US companies, but both recognize the importance of Europe. Agito is about to enter the market place; DiVitas has been active and successful for some time. Agito focuses on eFMC (the e is for enterprise) and they see UC as providing a broad framework for enterprise applications.
Pejman Roshan, VP of Marketing at Agito said, Our FMC solution integrates into PBXs without tampering with the desk phones. It provides applications for our mobile society while also ensuring that mobile calls and data applications are connected transparently to the best possible network--be it the cellular network, 3G, business Wi-Fi, public Wi-Fi, or home networks.
DiVitas has been focusing on both the SMB and enterprise space, and now they have started marketing their own UC client, as shown here. Details were not available at the time of publication, but No Jitter did get an advance shot of the UI. The ability to meet the needs of both sectors comes from the fact that the companys server software is hardware independent, so it runs on inexpensive desktop servers as well as enterprise platforms having redundant power supplies, disk drives, etc.
CISCO AND NOKIA
These two 800-lb gorillas have been marketing a Mobile Business Solution for some time and at the end of April the two companies issued an update, which stated that there were more than 100 customers in commercial use and more than 600 customers in trials for Mobile Business Solution from Cisco and Nokia. This is the spin: the solution extends the rich Cisco Unified IP Phone capabilities to Nokia E series smartphones over Cisco Unified Wireless Networks to offer users a seamless mobile experience in the enterprise environment and public cellular networks. Note that SCCP (aka Skinny) is employed rather than SIP.
That was an FMC-centric statement, but this solution should not be seen as an FMC solution. However, since the PBX (CallManager) sees call phones as regular extensions mobile UC is a given: the server knows the presence status of all the devices on the corporate network. In addition the solution features mobile VPN and secure remote access.
CONCLUSIONS
Mobile UC should not be seen as a subset of desktop UC. Mobility in the average workforce is around 40%, and the figure is rising year on year, in line with improved services. This means that the mobile variant leverages the value of the various UC applications and in some cases it is driving up the implementation of this technology at the desktop level.
FMC is the service that enables mobile UC: without it, information on the presence and availability of colleagues and friends would be lost when transitioning between wide area networks (GSM) and local area networks (Wi-Fi). However, we now have a broadband data service (HSPA), and this will be followed by WiMAX and LTE (Long Term Evolution). One upcoming challenge is therefore the ability to retain UC functionality when employing one of these new air interfaces. Its doable: phones have powerful computing resources and Moores Law will ensure that they become more powerful in future. And the June 24 news that Nokia will buy the 52% of Symbian it doesn't already own, and then give it away as an open source operating system, also is a significant leap forward.
