Dave Michels weighed in on the new Unified Communications Interoperability Forum on Pin Drop Soup; you should definitely check out his analysis.One thing Dave mentions that I agree is impressive is the level of commitment that the founding members seem to be putting into the effort, in the form of high-level support and participation from key executives.
Dave also makes a point similar to Michael Finneran on this site: "UCIF is attempting to create application level interoperability; this is a major and fairly unique undertaking."
Indeed, I'm hard pressed to think of a similar type of effort, but when I was briefed in advance of the announcement, Bernard Aboba of Microsoft made the point that any step forward in any area represents a significant benefit. Specifically, he said that going from bilateral interoperability agreements to multilateral, even if it's just in one application or product area, can be a huge win, since it can take months to set up the lab to test and establish just one bilateral relationship--not to mention setting up the legal agreements.
Even if the UCIF process took a year to conclude a specific multilateral agreement, being able to take off from there with no further wrangling would represent "an order of magnitude savings" over replicating the process via multiple bilateral agreements.
