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Voicecon Amsterdam: A Modest Show with Some Big Announcements

As I'm sure you've read on this site, Siemens announced its mobile UC strategy, which I liked for a couple of reasons. First, I like the focus on mobility for Siemens to differentiate itself above the noise of the other UC vendors. I've long felt that mobile UC has a much stronger value proposition than desktop based UC, and it's where Siemens should be focused. I've written on this before but in my opinion, desktop based UC doesn't add all that much value as an application (it does as a development platform but that's another column). When I'm on my desktop, aggregating information from the various collaboration tools isn't all that difficult to do. Also, the desktop UC market is and is always going to be dominated by Microsoft, IBM and, to a lesser extent Cisco (although WebEx and Jabber give Cisco a puncher's chance) but competition in the mobile UC space is wide open, so Siemens' focus here should provide some differentiation for them. The other reason I think the timing of this announcement is significant is that I really do believe that we're close to having the vision of the "all wireless" enterprise come true. The 802.11n standard will be ratified next year and the end user experience between wired and wireless networking will be negligible, so UC vendors won't necessarily need to have a comprehensive wired portfolio to provide an end to end solution.

Now the Microsoft announcement regarding OCS 2007 R2 was significant for a number of reasons. First, Microsoft rarely does global product announcements outside of North America so it was nice to see the software giant realize that unified communications is a global trend not just a US one. More importantly though, the announcement isn't as significant as what it portends.

When Microsoft first rolled out OCS it provided great desktop functionality and then relied on partners such as Nortel, Siemens and Mitel for the voice functionality. OCS R2, while not being a full IP PBX, does add many of the features that were missing and puts in question why, long term, it needs the IP PBX vendors at all, and what the opportunity for a voice centric vendor will be. I've heard the age old argument that voice is such a special application and only the vendors that have decades of experience can compete in the "real time" communications space, and I partially agree with that statement. I do think right now that perception is there on the customer side, but over time that perception will diminish for two reasons.

First, I don't really believe that Microsoft can't learn voice quickly. I know it took Cisco years but that was the first new vendor into the voice industry for years. Since Cisco, lots of smaller companies have popped up and quickly learned what they needed to deliver a quality product. Microsoft won't have it perfect yet, but it will be "good enough" quickly.

Second, and a lot of people will argue with me about this, voice is less important today than it was five years ago and will be even less important five years from now. Workers are becoming much more email-, messaging-, SMS- and chat-oriented. This is an increasingly larger trend with the generation Y and digital natives. In fact, Yankee Group's latest consumer surveys shows that people under 25 would rather use text based communications than voice. This means that companies will need to deploy non voice based ways of communicating with customers, lowering the reliance on voice which, in turn, lowers the barrier to entry for new vendors. This will bring not only Microsoft into voice but also a company like Citrix, which built its own click to call application, and possibly IBM.

So what does this mean for the traditional voice vendors? Over time, the industry really doesn't need the dozen or so vendors that we have. I think many of Microsoft's partners will be forced to shift their business model to integration services, being a niche vendor or just going away. I understand its contrary to a lot of popular opinion, even with the traditional buying community, but over time that will shift as well.

In summary, overall for a first year show I was satisfied with the attendance and energy at VoiceCom Amsterdam but the announcements, if understood within context of where the industry is did carry the show. I don't expect this every year but for me it was worth the time commitment to go.