When voice over IP first started coming out, many people--primarily in the employ of one Cisco Systems--made bold to proclaim that voice was "just another application on the network." Those who understood their audience (when talking to telecom/communications professionals) refined the formula to change "just another" to "an", recognizing that voice had special demands and created special demands. Now we have video imposing its own requirements and potentially creating its own impacts (as this two-part Slideshow based on Terry Slattery's Enterprise Connect presentation demonstrates--Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
But as we progress into Unified Communications and Communications Enabled Business Processes, those within the enterprise who run the real-time communications (i.e., voice and video) systems are likely to find themselves not so much running an application as providing a service, or more precisely providing an element of a service.
This was my takeaway from a really interesting conversation I had at Interop last week with Steve Shalita, VP of marketing at NetScout Systems, who took pains to remind me that NetScout considers itself not a "network management" company, but a service delivery management company. Steve said this reflects trends among forward-thinking IT shops today.
"Today in IT, they don't deliver applications any more," Steve said. Instead, they deliver services.
What that means is that an application--whether it be a business process application, a piece of client software, or a functionality like voice or video--will have less value over time as a siloed element. Instead, it's all about combining these applications to deliver a service that's appropriate and effective for the user who needs that service.
This theme seems to be emerging across the board as IT departments and the vendors who serve them confront a number of trends: UC; BYOD (which removes IT's control over the user interface and forces IT to provide a service that can run securely and to policy on virtually any device); and Big Data and analytics, which provide ever expanding opportunities to make use of the wealth of data on user activity that network systems can now generate.
On that last point, Steve Shalita commented to me: "Anyone can collect data; it's what you do with the data that matters."
Steve conceded that today, most IT organizations remain siloed based on application delivery, and have yet to implement the kinds of service delivery management on the back-end and role-based management on the end user side that could deliver on the promise he and others envision. But he insisted that change is coming, and that Service Delivery Manager is a job title that is increasingly being seen within IT shops.
And you know, he's right. Not all the jobs that came up here represent the kind of Service Delivery Manager that Steve is talking about, but many of them do.
In many ways, the vision that Steve Shalita is talking about here is another way of describing what Tom Nolle characterizes as "plug and play apps". The vision is one in which the IT team delivers an orchestrated service composed of multiple application elements; Tom spells out explicitly what Steve Shalita and I didn't get into during our conversation: The role that cloud-based applications will play in this vision.
It seems clearer than ever to me that the Cloud and the eventual commoditization of voice in the network are not going to mean the end of the need for IT/communications professionals. As in the initial VOIP migration, they'll have a broader vision, a more complex challenge, and plenty to keep them busy.
