This week's VoiceCon eNews newsletter, posted over at Information Week, dealt with the idea of vendors giving away UC applications for free. I just read a post from Dave Michels at his Pin Drop Soup site that made me think even more on this subject.Dave writes about some of the startups that are doing innovative things around cloud-based UC applications, and he discusses examples of cloud-based, tightly focused applications. It seems evident to me that any UC application that can reside in the cloud and be delivered via a cloud service like Amazon's is an application that's on the fast track to commoditization, and is one that communications platform vendors probably should want no part of.
Dave quotes one of the startup execs saying, "Oh yes, I'm very happy that Microsoft and Cisco are working hard to make people more productive [via UC/CEBP apps]. Now Doris in accounting will lose my purchase order 20% faster!" Dave observes that, "I think [he] is suggesting that broad UC applications sold to thousands of customers can't have the same impact (to Doris) as a custom developed voice enabled application specifically written for her."
I buy that, but I think this particular exec is a little too contemptuous of Microsoft and Cisco. I go back to the iPhone analogy: It's the company that builds the right platform who's going to win. Who do you think Microsoft(!) and Cisco see themselves as in this scenario: The platform vendor who rakes in the high-margin bucks, or the software developer hustling to build the next point-solution widget? The world needs both, of course, but Microsoft and Cisco aren't the ones whose apps are going to make people more productive--their platforms will.
And by the way, Microsoft may know developers better than anyone else, but I don't think that makes them anything like a shoo-in for this market. I think the communications platform choice is going to come down to whose platform works the best at delivering real-time traffic. It'd have to, right? People just won't have the patience with voice and video that they had with desktop apps.
That means Avaya or Siemens, who have built call control (for lack of a better term) at scale; or Cisco, who's built IP networks for telepresence, have at least as good a chance of building the platform of choice. As long as they're willing to heed the warning in that startup executive's statement: Those big guys really aren't the best ones to build the applications.
