Several key themes stood out for me at the first, very successful Enterprise Connect. We addressed some of them in the locknote panel on Thursday, but here are my quick takes. I'd love to hear your reactions, too.
The cloud came down to earth. As Eric noted in his wrap-up of the keynote session on this topic, for most enterprises of any size, the cloud is still a "consideration," not a done deal. The cloud will not solve all your communications problems, and it carries with it its own complexities, including deciding among public clouds and private clouds, and multi-tenant and dedicated environments, as well as security, SLA and management concerns. Accessing certain commodity communications via the cloud may save companies money and resources (email is the most cited, and probably the best, example of this). But delivering a complete and complex set of communications--including presence, conferencing, chat, video and enterprise social software--via the cloud may not be simpler (chances are, you'll still have to juggle multiple supplier relationships), and it may not even be more cost effective. The one big driver for the cloud: Mobility, which requires support for multiple devices and operating systems.
Video will succeed with many use cases, but it won’t replace voice. Despite Cisco's mantra that "video is the new voice," I don’t think people will start automatically placing video calls instead of audio calls as a default. For one thing, the infrastructure isn't there--and it won't be for several more years in most organizations. For another, video is a high-bandwidth communications tool in more ways than one: it requires constant attention from participants, as well as a high level of engagement. People have spent the last 10 years moving away from high-touch media (which is why texting has replaced audio calls). It's also important to distinguish between video streaming and video conferencing. One man in the audience at the lock note noted said that his daughter and her friends constantly send each other video clips of themselves, and his point was that they will logically want to do this when they enter the work place. But those are still video streams; the girls are not actually communicating in real time via video, and that's a very important distinction. I find it unlikely they will, in fact, shoot video of themselves (working? playing? making silly faces?) and then send them to their colleagues, but even if they do, that's a different application from video conferencing.
Mobile is here and it's changing everything. The biggest trend in enterprise communications is the fact that more employees are becoming more mobile every day, and they are relying on their smart phones and tablets to communicate and collaborate. IT departments must figure out how to support these users, and the options are many: provide and support a variety of devices or just one; deploy enterprise software to multiple mobile users, or just some; ask employees to use their personal tools for business, and then juggle multiple "identities"; etc. I think this will be one of the biggest challenges in the years to come, and it will involve business decisions as much as technology ones.
Interoperability is not the same as integration. Everyone at the show was still clamoring for standards that enable interoperability, an old song that still needs to be sung. After all, the whole point of communications tools is to, you know, communicate. In a post last week, Zeus argued that middleware has served the software market well, and that it should be the choice for interoperability in the software-based communications market, too. Middleware is a great strategy for integration--getting your conferencing, voice and presence systems into your productivity and back-office applications--and it will likely shape the way in which that market will develop over the next several years. But it's not a solution for interoperability, which is about getting one communications tool to talk to another. Think about it: the PSTN works like this; I don't need to worry about who your carrier is, or what kind of phone you use, to make a call to you. So does email; when I send you a message, I don’t worry about what email client you use, or whether your PC is on the latest OS or the same one as mine. Neither does my IT department. Likewise, I should be able to see your presence, and chat or conference with you, regardless of what client you use for those modes of communications. I can dream, can’t I?
Interoperability is not the same as integration. Everyone at the show was still clamoring for standards that enable interoperability, an old song that still needs to be sung. After all, the whole point of communications tools is to, you know, communicate. In a post last week, Zeus argued that middleware has served the software market well, and that it should be the choice for interoperability in the software-based communications market, too. Middleware is a great strategy for integration--getting your conferencing, voice and presence systems into your productivity and back-office applications--and it will likely shape the way in which that market will develop over the next several years. But it's not a solution for interoperability, which is about getting one communications tool to talk to another. Think about it: the PSTN works like this; I don't need to worry about who your carrier is, or what kind of phone you use, to make a call to you. So does email; when I send you a message, I don’t worry about what email client you use, or whether your PC is on the latest OS or the same one as mine. Neither does my IT department. Likewise, I should be able to see your presence, and chat or conference with you, regardless of what client you use for those modes of communications. I can dream, can’t I?
