The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) was launched last evening at an invitation only dinner in San Francisco. The event, which was moderated by Jim Burton of UC Strategies, marks an important milestone in the development of the UC industry. The founding members are Microsoft, Polycom, Logitech/LifeSize, Hewlett Packard, and Juniper Networks, though invitations have been extended to all of the "usual suspects" and we expect to see the list growing in the months to come. No single vendor has all of the pieces of a UC solution and organizations will typically be deploying UC solutions in a multi-vendor environment, so for the UC industry to progress, an assurance of multi-vendor interoperability will be essentialRecognizing the importance of this development, in his opening remarks Mr. Burton noted, "By working together, the UCIF will help make the UC market grow sooner than it would otherwise, with each vendor now able to get their share of a larger pie". Modeled on similar vendor forums like the Wi-Fi Alliance and the WiMAX Forum, the UCIF describes itself as "an open alliance of technology leaders working together to fully realize the potential of Unified Communications" with a vision of enabling "interoperability of Unified Communications Hardware [sic] and Software [sic] across enterprises, service providers, and consumer clouds, as a means of generating incremental business opportunity for all stakeholders in the ecosystem".
To be sure, interoperability has been a hotly debated topic in UC circles, and the point of countless jabs and counterpunches at VoiceCon, the UC Summit, and other industry events where UC is on the agenda. The claims and counterclaims fly fast and furious, so hopefully the Forum will get beyond the "Is so, is not" tenor that has surrounded much of the interoperability discussion up to this point and get down to the real work of delivering capabilities customers can use.
In describing their role, Bernard Aboba, Principal Architect at Microsoft and UCIF Board Member stresses that they are an "open forum", and not a covert attempt to exclude any part of the UC ecosystem. When questioned about the absence of obvious names like Avaya, Cisco and IBM, he points to the difficulties in getting large organizations to work through their own internal approval processes. If one of those marquee names were to publicly announce they were not going to participate in the Forum that would be news indeed, but we have not seen any indications that would be the case.
Board Member Jeff Rodman, co-founder and CTO of Polycom, points out that the UCIF does not intend to co-opt the standards development organizations or "SDOs" like the IETF. Rather they see their role as providing a vehicle for all developers to confirm they are all reading the standards the same way and developing products that can be confirmed to interoperate. The UCIF does not intend to develop any standards but does see the potential that they may recommend areas where standards are needed or to inform the SDOs of issues they find in trying to develop products based on existing specifications. However, they will leave it up to the established bodies to actually come up with the standards.
Their initial prospectus defines three tiers of membership: Board Members, Contributors, and Adopters; only Board Members and Contributors can participate and vote in committee. With only a few months of work under their belt, the Board is still working on basic plans and directions. They are finalizing a vision statement to crystallize their plans and a list of 12-, 36-, and 60-month initiatives to start putting the pieces into motion. They do intend to have certification standards and testing procedures as well as official certifications of compliance much like the Wi-Fi Alliance or WiMAX Forum. The actual certifications will likely be done by approved outside labs as is the case with most of the other forums and alliances.
Vendor alliances of this type have been enormously successful in moving technologies forward. The first of these I recall was the Frame Relay Forum, which eventually merged with the MPLS Forum as the technologies advanced. Probably the single most successful example has been the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose marshalling of the wireless LAN standards has led to one of the fastest technology adoptions we have witnessed in the wireless space. The Wi-Fi Alliance's stature has become so well established that vendors were building products that complied with the Draft 2.0 certified version of the 802.11n standard almost two years before the official standard was ratified. The market knew that if the Wi-Fi Alliance said it was going to work and would be backwards compatible with the final standard when it was produced, it was safe to start spending money on it.
Make no mistake about it however, the job the UCIF is taking on is going to be far more daunting than anything that has gone before. With technologies like Wi-Fi, WiMAX, MPLS, or Gigabit Ethernet, you are dealing with relatively low-level compatibility issues; not that those aren't challenging-it's just that they only deal with Layers 1 and 2 of the OSI model. The UCIF will be looking to confirm complete interoperability for the full spectrum of UC applications and functionality to Layer 7 of the OSI model. I cannot think of another interoperability forum that has taken on such a mammoth task.
All of us in the UC community will be watching developments in the UCIF with great interest. The first step will be to sign up the rest of the key players and that will include wired and wireless carriers (some of whom have already expressed interest), mobile device manufacturers, and all of the other piece parts of the UC ecosystem. Then they must establish priorities and realistic timelines for developing certification plans for the various UC applications. According to Board Member Mark Gorzynski, Chief Scientist at Hewlett Packard, interoperability for telepresence, firewall traversal, and conferencing controls are expected to be on the list of 12-month initiatives.
The biggest challenge, however, will be execution. Once they've "gathered everyone into the tent", we don't want to turn this into a circus. These capabilities have to work cleanly and efficiently across the widest range of systems and devices. The alternative to the UCIF will be a hodge-podge of bi-lateral agreements that will basically leave successful UC implementation possible only in a single-vendor environment.
I'm rooting for these guys to pull it off.
