Newcomers to the enterprise real-time communications market--Cisco in the late 1990s, Microsoft in the past couple of years--have had to make the case that the change they were bringing to the market was urgent. Perhaps paradoxically, this was because the real-time communications market moves so slowly. As our old friend Hank Levine wrote last week: "The historic tendency in the voice world--unlike, say, PCs--is to ride the gear until it drops, which is more like a decade than the five years it takes to depreciate it fully."
Newcomers to the enterprise real-time communications market--Cisco in the late 1990s, Microsoft in the past couple of years--have had to make the case that the change they were bringing to the market was urgent. Perhaps paradoxically, this was because the real-time communications market moves so slowly. As our old friend Hank Levine wrote last week: "The historic tendency in the voice world--unlike, say, PCs--is to ride the gear until it drops, which is more like a decade than the five years it takes to depreciate it fully."Thus, the voice market's historically slow movement put a premium on market-overhang strategies by newcomers. If major enterprises only go out to bid once every 10 years, the new vendors have to make sure they don't miss that window of opportunity because their technology is perceived as either immature or not adding value vis-a-vis the old technology. They do that by convincing the customer that the risk of buying "old" technology in the replacement cycle is higher than the risk of holding off on the procurement altogether for a couple of more years. Enterprises tend to be more than happy to oblige by delaying purchases as long as possible, as Hank noted.
None of the foregoing is new, but I'm restating it as a lead-in to an interesting perspective that I heard last week from Sonu Aggarwal. Sonu left Microsoft in April after 10 years, and is now CEO of UnifySquare, a systems integration and consulting company that specializes in Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) installations. When I chatted with Sonu recently, he said UnifySquare already has three contracts in hand for OCS implementations with global enterprises of 60,000 to 200,000 employees--two proof-of-concept-scale deployments, and one global rollout.
Sonu's take is that the migration toward the complete Microsoft/unified communications vision is a long-term process: "This is a long transformation," he told me. "In some senses, it's a 20-year transformation," running from 1995 to 2015.
Partly this comes from Sonu's own perspective, which is as a founder (in 1996) of one of the early instant messaging companies, Flash Communications. Flash built an enterprise-focused IM system, and was acquired by Microsoft in 1998, which is what brought Sonu to Microsoft. So his timeline begins just when enterprises were beginning to see the business value in instant messaging. But the real grabber is his conception that the fulfillment of the UC vision won't come until 2015.
Or maybe it's not such a remarkably long time. We're talking about six and a half years from now. I looked back six and a half years ago, to January 2002, where I found this Miercom test article in that month's edition of Business Communications Review: "IP-PBXs: Ready and Waiting." That optimistic title was appropriate for its time, as Miercom found near-perfect call completion rates and increasing feature/functionality. Yet there were still various gaps that you wouldn't find today: Cisco was the most scalable at just 10,000 stations per system; only Avaya and Alcatel supported 1,000 or more IP stations per system. Shoretel (then called Shoreline) was still selling a system that supported only analog phones.
Meanwhile, Allan Sulkin's January 2002 market review was titled "IP: Only Bright Spot in a Down PBX Market." And the first factor that Allan cited for the PBXs' down year was, "Market overhang from IP telephony." In that 2002 article, Allan reported that in the previous year (2001), IP station shipments had grown year over year but still represented less than 8% of the total market. By 2005, IP was out-shipping TDM. You could be a TDM bigot in 2002 without looking completely ridiculous. By 2005, you couldn't.
Of course, there's no guarantee that UC as envisioned by Microsoft, IBM and their ilk will follow the same adoption curve--but on the other hand, there's no reason to imagine it'll be wildly different, either. The controlling factor in voice system adoption is replacement of old systems. What those systems are replaced *with* depends on the maturity and value of the new technology.
Maybe UC won't be ready to take center stage by 2015. But I wouldn't bet against it.
