There's great things coming for this industry down the road but it's a stronger market if all the participants are here in force.
Day 1 of fall VoiceCon got underway on Monday in San Francisco. All the usual suspects were here in force except for the two biggest names in the industry--Cisco and Microsoft are absent. Sure, Cisco is on a few panels here throughout the session but there's no VoiceCon booth, demos or product. Microsoft has a booth at the co-located Enterprise 2.0 show but no VoiceCon presence at all. So this begs the questions, why aren't they here and what kind of message are they trying to send to the industry?I'm sure both vendors have their reasons for their lack of presence but I think it's bad for the industry and it sends a bad message from the respective companies. Cisco, in particular, is having a collaboration summit for analysts the very next week, in the same city to provide an update on their vision and announce a number of new products. Why not have the announcements be part of VoiceCon?
The irony is that both Cisco and Microsoft talk about how unified communications and collaboration is not something any single vendor can deliver, and how the entire industry must work together to democratize UC. If that's the case, wouldn't it make a stronger statement for Cisco and Microsoft to be here supporting VoiceCon?
In fact, during the panel I moderated on "Next Generation Communications Architectures," one of the audience members asked why Microsoft wasn't there since the company was noticeable by their absence from the panel. I thought co-moderator and VoiceCon coordinator, Eric Krapf, handled the question well by answering with the truth, that he's not sure why they aren't here but did say Microsoft will remain an important part of future VoiceCons.
I get the fact that this is a tough economy and everyone's looking to cut costs but I know that there is a tremendous amount of interest from everyone on how these companies see this industry evolving over the next few years. Microsoft, of course, is on the precipice of having what they consider a full IP PBX replacement product finally available, filling that hole in OCS. Cisco has made many investments in UC, both buying and building, and their products range from the cloud based WebEx suite, to mobile solutions, to TelePresence and all of their other UC product offerings. So there's plenty of interest in the roadmap from these two vendors but we'll need to wait to see more vision and product direction from both of these vendors.
I made a comment on my panel on Monday morning that the one thing I would like to see VoiceCon focus on is driving and highlighting vendor interoperability with one another and using VoiceCon as a way to demonstrate it. I know there has been limited interoperability to this point but easy, multi vendor interoperability remains an issue for most organizations looking to deploy UC in large scale. If the vendor community were able to come together and create seamless interoperability, usage of the products would go through the roof. The market leaders may worry that this kind of openness may cause them to lose a little market share, and it might, but seamless interoperability will create a much bigger market, producing opportunity for all vendors. A smaller piece of a big pie nets more revenue than having a large chunk of a much smaller pie.
So, while it might seem a bit counter-intuitive, being open and interoperable with your enemies is, in my opinion, one of the keys to accelerating usage of UC. I think some of the smaller, niche vendors have done this as a way of remaining viable, but the large market leaders such as IBM, Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft would benefit greatly as well. Interoperability will allow for faster deployments which in turn get converted to usage from end users which will grow the overall market.
VoiceCon is going to remain the industry's best communications and collaboration conference and there's great things coming for this industry down the road but it's a stronger market if all the participants are here in force. So, Cisco and Microsoft, I know you had your reasons for not being here this year but the UC industry needs your presence and like it or not, you need the rest of the industry in order to thrive.There's great things coming for this industry down the road but it's a stronger market if all the participants are here in force.
