The discussion of interoperability and standards gets pretty complex, and a lot of excuses get made, but when you step back, it's really not that difficult to understand what the role of enterprise communications should be, and how openness should play into that role and add value to those systems.Simply put: In the old world, your PBX's proprietary functions were what added the value, and even though there was parity among the system vendors' feature/function sets, you still weren't free to change out or mix and match systems because the lack of interoperability resulted in vendor lock-in. Note that while you wouldn't really choose to mix and match, sometimes you were forced to do so because of M&A or other absorption of alien systems.
Today, the opportunity for value-add is in making an enterprise communications system the best and most effective broker among the myriad devices, networks and systems that terminate in the hands of your end users. The enterprise can no longer dictate, across the broad user base, what their users will be communicating on, yet the enterprise still wants to control key assets such as contact numbers and addresses, as well as efficiently integrating communications with other enterprise applications.
So a vendor whose platform can't do this brokering because it is limited in which systems it will talk to--that vendor is the enemy of enterprises who want a next-generation communications capability.
None of this is particularly new, but it came into focus for me when I read Dave Michels' latest feature on No Jitter. Dave is writing about the future of the phone, and he makes a very convincing case that mobiles have only increased their lead over proprietary wireline enterprise systems in the year since Dave first tackled this topic for us.
To me, that's the other side of the coin: End users driving modes of communications within the enterprise. And if there weren't a need for some enterprise asset control, you might find yourself deciding not to even bother with an enterprise voice communications system--just toss all of it out and let people use their cell phones, Skype, whatever. Keep phones for jobs that are really phone-based--i.e., call centers--and just forget about the rest.
And in fact, many enterprises are hoping to be able to do the next best thing, which is to shift all of that burden into the cloud: Find a hosted service or datacenter where you can run whatever brokering software you need in order to tie your communications together and tie it into the enterprise. That will be an appealing choice unless the vendors who sell CPE-based solutions are able to present a compelling vision for the future and architecture for communications that enterprises find attractive enough to embrace as a path forward.
