Definitional matters continue to bedevil Unified Communications, and UC concepts are being comingled with issues such as VoIP. Ultimately, much of the current discussion misses the point of how unified communications is going to be transformative. Let's take a look at recent news.I've been bemused by a debate that's been going on in the blogosphere since around the first of the year about whether VoIP is dead, dying, recovering or in good health. Last week, Irwin Lazar wrote in No Jitter about the analysts and bloggers lining up on the various sides of that issue. Irwin's review, Dan York's fine videoblog and Om Malik's summary all do a nice job of bringing into perspective the various viewpoints about VoIP's health. (
My view is that VoIP -- as a separate industry -- is vanishing just as IP technology is replacing TDM. VoIP is disappearing into the plumbing, just as CTI and TCP/IP did in the past. What has "died" is the vision of VoIP as enabling a revolutionary peer-to-peer communication infrastructure to supplant the PSTN. Ian Bell's commentary provides a fine summary of five factors that led to its demise.
What's interesting is that in several of these commentaries, UC is mentioned as "what comes next" or "where VoIP is migrating."
Here's another example from another forum. A reader posted a question lamenting about "missing the VoIP bandwagon" and wondering whether his company should roll out VoIP or just focus on UC. In my opinion, that's clearly mixing up the tracks and the trains!
In all of these pixels from bloggers, commentators, and readers, I think that many are losing sight of the core issue: Communications, and voice communications especially, is going through a fundamental, disruptive, transformative change. Certainly, moving to IP allows new transport capabilities. But what's important is that it helps support the emergence of entirely new ways of envisioning communications.
The fundamental change is the shift from a vertically-siloed industry to one that is horizontally layered. Just a few years ago, most IP-PBX components (boards, busses, OS, applications software, endpoints, etc.) came from a single, vertically-integrated supplier. We are moving to the paradigm that the data processing industry shifted to three decades ago, with components from different suppliers working together through standards, open interfaces and APIs.
Most importantly, this shift to a layered infrastructure enables the emergence of an ecosystem of developers - some affiliated with suppliers, but also independent subject matter experts in many narrowly defined fields. This happened three decades ago in data, and the result was thousands of applications packages and programs developed to meet specialized requirements.
Now, with the move to a layered infrastructure, we are doing the same thing in communications. Application providers will find innovative ways to design communications capabilities into their existing product lines. Subject matter experts will design specialized functionality tailored for the specific requirements of a particular industry or functional business area. And these communications capabilities will be embedded where the work is done - in business applications and workflow processes, not just as part of a separate "communications system."
These developers will assure that over the next decade most voice communications will become software assisted. Someone needing information or approvals to complete a task will trigger the application environment to identify available staff with the needed skills, and then facilitate a connection. Looking up someone's phone number, reaching for a handset and dialing will become distant memories from an earlier era, just as we now look back to the days when callers had to turn a crank to alert Mabel to make a connection.
The benefit of integrating communications into business processes will be to enable much more effective ways to get things done. That is the driver for all of these coming changes, especially in these turbulent economic times. VoIP will be somewhere within the bowels of the infrastructure - not dead, but likely forgotten.
