|
Page 3 of 3
Real Unification?
UC is a wonderful concept and its implementation would definitely put communications in a different perspective. But the question remains that with so many vendors having different agendas; would the end consumer be delivered the value that UC promises? And if so, what is the reasonable timeline and what are the steps to achieve there.
We do not have to worry about the innovation happening in UC. What is lacking today is the effort to ‘unify’ these disparate unified communication systems. We need a methodology to integrate these so that the end consumer derives the benefits of innovations across all systems—this would be the U2C methodology. This in some sense will define the success of Unified Communication.
Let’s say there are two enterprises A and B with a UC solution from say Microsoft and Cisco. The U2C solution would unify these two. The Cisco Unified Communication Manager would interact with LCS (Live Communication Server) and we could have an ‘application convergence’ where a meeting request could pop up on a Cisco IP Phone. Based on a person’s availability (presence), the same meeting request could be sent to the mobile phone of the consumer and these MSCs could be Nortel MSCs!
Based on the availability of the person on the ‘Phone’, his presence status logs him automatically into Facebook and he can do the same things from his ‘Phone’ (whatever phone that might be) as he would do from his PC. The “Phone” is your network.
Logged into Skype and setting a status would send the same status information via Twitter. Blogging on Wordpress would notify guys who are “subscriber” to that blog. In some sense it is a “push” of Feed Readers rather than the conventional “pull” strategy.
In Conclusion
More than the UC solutions themselves, the need of the hour are solutions that will integrate the different solutions. An enterprise customer having an Avaya solution would be keen on retaining it as much as possible, yet would love to have the flexibility of other systems. Customers hate to throw away their existing systems and a company with a U2C strategy would undoubtedly have an extra edge and a better piece of the pie than any of the UC vendors themselves.
It would be in the interest of these vendor companies to encourage the U2C strategy. These are the days of standardizations and no more can these vendors live in their own ‘proprietary’ islands. They need to embrace this or ignore it at their own peril.
T G Gokulakrishnan is Practice Head, Cisco Practice at Servion Global Solutions
l Page 1 | Page 2 l
|