VoiceCon 2010 kicks off with a bang but highlights some big challenges ahead for the communications industry.
Monday March 22 was the first day of VoiceCon and those that were able to attend the "Next Gen Communication Architectures" Summit at all 11am were treated to a highly spirited and entertaining session. I was co-moderator of the session with Eric Krapf and we directed questions to a panel made up of six individuals from vendors that talk the talk of a vision of a standards based world, but don't always walk the walk. Specifically the panel members were:Warren Barkley, Director of Product Engineering, Microsoft Manfred Arndt, Distinguished Technologies, HP Mike Seto, VP of Business Development and Applications, Polycom Shantanu Sarkar, Director of Engineering, VTG CTO, Cisco Phil Edholm, VP of Innovation and Technology Strategy, Avaya Pat Galvin, Architect-UC & C, IBM
Due to some travel problems, I was a little late entering the session but I did catch most of the first question, which I think had to do with the vision of where communication architecture was going and how it is moving away from vertical integration into distinct layers. Most of the vendors seemed to agree with this vision and it was a typical kumbaya panel at first.
However, very quickly, the questions were moved towards standards and interoperability, which created some heated debate. Much of the initial focus was attacking Cisco on its need to own everything end to end. If the industry is moving towards standards based communications, then why must Cisco continue to buy up companies, like Tandberg, and have to control the quality across the board? Shantanu defended this a little bit and claimed that Cisco would support the standards out there but did admit the quality would be better if it was Cisco across the board.
This seemed to draw the ire of Warren from Microsoft that was taking some shots across the bow at Cisco for having to go down this path, and then Phil Edholm from Avaya stepped in and challenged Microsoft as to why its Office Communicator wouldn't work on anyone else's product. Microsoft then shot back a challenge to the rest of the panel regarding being proprietary and then everyone got involved.
What I noticed in this session was how each of these vendors were willing to throw stones at each others' glass houses without recognizing they live in one as well. What I mean by this is each vendor on the panel has a product that has some kind of proprietary protocol that makes their stuff work better across its suite. For example, Cisco has very tight integration across its product lines (voice and data) but will work well with both Exchange and Lotus Notes. Microsoft however is almost endpoint agnostic, but OCS works much better with Share Point and Exchange than it does with Lotus Notes. IBM's Sametime Unified Telephony allows for multivendor telephony, but it's designed for Notes and Sametime, etc. So, each vendor can claim to be standards based where another one isn't but under the covers, they're just proprietary in the area that they're strongest in, which is why they have strength in that area. The main reason we are in this mess is because UC is the coming together of a number of distinct markets that have historically been served from multiple vendors.
I see this as a significant challenge for anyone out there evaluating these systems. In fact, one question came in from the audience stating that their environment was Microsoft desktop, Cisco network and voice and Polycom video and asked how they get it to work. No one could really answer the question but HP did talk a lot about services (shocker) and the role it could play and Alcatel Lucent gave a very self gratuitous answer of "buy from a communications vendor" (also a shocker), which IBM took offense to but didn't do anything to answer the question.
During the panel, I asked, if a company is currently going through an evaluation, what should be the decision criteria, and there wasn't a good answer given, leaving current evaluators scratching their heads, which is why UC deployments are still limited. So, what's the answer?
To me, the answer is easy to say but very difficult to do. It's a jointly agreed upon standard and all the vendors committing to the standard. The analogy of the WiFi alliance was used to highlight what could be. Prior to the WiFi alliance it was very difficult to get, say, a 3Com WiFi card to work with a Lucent end point. Once the standards got put in place and adhered to, the usage of WiFi exploded. Today, there are thousands of WiFi-enabled devices. Game systems, smart phones, PCs, Apple TV, etc. Usage is pervasive because the standard creates an environment where stuff "just works". That's not the case with UC.
I think the vendors realize the upside value of creating an environment of stuff that "just works" in that the usage of it would go through the roof,, like it did with WiFi. If anyone could truly use any communications device to communicate with any other device, then voice, video and collaboration capabilities would be embedded into almost everything we have and adoption would skyrocket.
Why do I think it's hard to achieve? I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that getting the vendors to all agree on a common standard itself can be quite challenging. Look at the niche Telepresence market. Cisco is pushing Telepresence Interoperability Protocol and Polycom is heading down a different path with its Open Collaboration Alliance. Everyone wants their standard to become the industry standard.
Second, it changes the economics of the industry in a big way. While the WiFi alliance created an environment where we can embed WiFi in anything, it added value to the game systems and smart phones but drove down the cost of the infrastructure, changing the business model significantly.
I expect to see this topic continue to be a heated topic for the rest of this show and future VoiceCon shows. The buying community needs the standard to help make deployments an choice easier and the vendors need to step up and figure out how to do this sooner than later or the vision of where we are going will remain only a vision.
Thanks for an entertaining day one! VoiceCon 2010 kicks off with a bang but highlights some big challenges ahead for the communications industry.
