I had the following exchange with Paul McMillan of Siemens, who responded to my recent post on UC and the cloud:
First I have to say I didn't realize I was that old when you said I have been around for a long time;) I like to think I'm still young I guess. In any event, I wanted to address a couple of points, the first being the willingness of the enterprise to adopt cloud services including UC. It's fair to say the Cloud has some maturing to do but its also fair to say that the uptake from major corporations for cloud services is impressive given the maturity of the technology. Second I don't think I can buy into the comparison of CTI which offered, I believe, limited integration when you think of it. That would be the inverse of the cloud model. Centrex services are another matter and my feeling is that some folks might consider centrex successful but what really held it back is that beyond telephony, what else did it offer? The answer is not very much. The cloud model doesn't have these restrictions. More and more application functions and capabilities are ported to the cloud every day. The pace of innovations is very impressive. UC in the cloud is a natural fit and let's face it, if the SMB market alone adopts the cloud as a model it's a big win. Why would the SMB market do that? One reason is access to technologies they are not able to implement on their own. If an SMB can get the same LOB [line of business] applications as larger organizations, the playing field can be somewhat leveled. When you embed communications functionality into that LOB application and deliver it as a service, well the value proposition just got a lot brighter. If you look across the industry today just about everyone is making a big bet on the Cloud (Cisco, MS, IBM, SAP, and even Oracle has changed its tune completely). Furthermore the cloud takes on many definitions but what's most important from my perspective is that we demonstrate adaptability of our technology into whatever cloud model emerges (public cloud, private cloud, hybrid model etc). When I talked about the number of developers working in Amazon's cloud I was kind of surprised to see you write whether they were doing anything useful for the enterprise. Im not sure 450k plus developers can just play around in the cloud and not generate something useful, otherwise they probably won't be there for long. To answer the question directly, they are generating a lot of useful applications for vertical markets in particular and we believe we can tap into that innovation to deliver additional value. What's most interesting to me about the cloud and more importantly the role of UC in cloud architectures is that it is truly a blank slate from which a great deal of innovative applications, deployment models, and use cases can be developed. It's really a model that allows for a lot of the concepts developed over the last few years to be proven out (mashups, on demand applications, and mass collaboration are among some of the things the cloud can most easily foster). In last year's fall VoiceCon we spoke at length about Federation services and this is just one example of a capability that could be cloud based and is probably optimally placed in the cloud since it gives enterprise customers the widest possible reach to collaborate beyond their borders. Fred thanks for keeping me honest and letting me respond. Take care and enjoy the rest of the summer Hope to see you at Fall VoiceCon.
My response to Paul:
Thanks Paul. Points well taken. My comments were focused on the enterprise rather than SMB, where I agree the cloud is likely to have its biggest impact, at least in the short term. Since our readers are typically enterprise-oriented, I didn't make that distinction as clear as I should have.
With regard to developers providing what a specific enterprise might want, I think to an experience that we had just earlier in the week. We are working to create a community site for NoJitter and VoiceCon, and want to launch as close to Sep. 1 as possible. We spoke to several service providers about what they can deliver, and while each had interesting templates, none had the specific combination of apps and features that we'd like. Each told us that they'd be adding the missing capabilities but were vague about exactly when they'd become available, and while each said that customization of the template was possible, the costs were considerable. I don't believe that scenario is unique to us or this project.
With regard to developers providing what a specific enterprise might want, I think to an experience that we had just earlier in the week. We are working to create a community site for NoJitter and VoiceCon, and want to launch as close to Sep. 1 as possible. We spoke to several service providers about what they can deliver, and while each had interesting templates, none had the specific combination of apps and features that we'd like. Each told us that they'd be adding the missing capabilities but were vague about exactly when they'd become available, and while each said that customization of the template was possible, the costs were considerable. I don't believe that scenario is unique to us or this project.
Finally, from Paul:
For the enterprise I believe a hybrid model will emerge where certain software functions will reside within the enterprise and other software functions will move to the cloud. Hopefully that clarifies my thoughts on the subject. Take care Fred.
