Think Unified Communications is the next big implementation for you? How do you know? What productivity will really be delivered? UC has great promise as well as big financial risks.I met Paul McMillan, Director UC Technical Vision & Strategy, for Siemens Enterprise Communications at VoiceCon in Orlando. He had a method for trying out UC in the cloud, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). This method is still in the proof-of-concept phase.
Enterprise staff could play with features to truly learn the value of the UC menu components. UCaaS could also stimulate the earlier adoption of UC, presently being held back by the restrictions on ICT budgets due to the economy. Paul envisions two UCaaS pricing models: a subscription service and a pay-as-you-go model.
The idea for UCaaS for Siemens started in 2008 and was announced at VoiceCon. The UC capabilities will be operating on the Amazon EC2 platform, a business service that already exists. The platform is described on the Amazon site.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
This platform already has a number of developers (estimated to be 450K) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) that can be used to add applications to the UC environment designed by Siemens using OpenScape. Siemens will releasing an SDK on the EC2 cloud as a parallel effort.
Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
The EC2 pricing structure is focused on usage more than flat fees. The pricing looks very attractive. I expect a number of cloud startups will be using EC2 to host their services. This will accelerate the development of applications especially for vertical markets. The key concepts are:
1. Adaptability of the OpenScape software portfolio, to port operations to the cloud 2. Show customer facing concepts that accelerate the UC adoption process 3. Reduce the risks in deployment 4. Limit the capital cost for the UC startup 5. Reduce the time-to-use for the user
What I like about this approach is that size does not really matter. I see mostly large enterprises considering UC implementations. The UCaaS offerings will allow enterprises of all sizes to get a taste and feel for UC and where it best fits in their environment.
Paul believes the customer portal is critical to building a business on Amazon's web service infrastructure. The portal is where the customer enters into the cloud. It is a single point of entry for sign on, provisioning and operational management.. The portal can be white-labeled by a service provider for their individual offering on EC2.
I can conceive of multiple scenarios for UCaaS in the enterprise that will soon be emerging:
* An enterprise ICT organization or government agency could implement UC and sell it to various department or divisions without requiring a big startup budget. This would be private UCaaS clouds.
* The IP Telephony vendors may offer UC to enterprises as a service then migrate that customer to a purchased system.
* The IP Telephony vendors may offer UC to SMBs as a service to create another revenue stream.
* Small UC software vendors can offer their UC implementations on a trial basis to encourage enterprise consideration of their products.
* An enterprise could use UCaaS as part of their offering and keep other functions in house for security and compliance reasons (see my blog, The CaaS Cloud; Security and Compliance for justifications).
* Groups of individuals with common interests, such as professional organizations, could create UC services for their individual members who otherwise could not afford to implement UC.
* There can be federations of enterprises, vendors, government agencies, and education institutions that work together operating on a closed or open UC cloud.
* UCaaS, for vertical markets, such as health care, can become more efficient working together through UC.
* Carriers offering CENTREX services could add the UCaaS services to existing or new customers.
* Third party companies that are not carriers that offer hosted communications service can expand their offerings.
This UCaaS approach can eliminate servers for the enterprise. This would reduce the data center real estate requirements as well as reducing power and cooling expenses. There may be cost reducing changes for the ICT staff. I also expect that many enterprises will start deploying UC earlier because the cloud expense will be much easier to budget compared to an internal capital intensive implementation.
