For the past three days some industry "heavy hitters" have shared their organizations' visions and tried to capture the mindshare of the VoiceCon 2010 attendees and other communication professionals around the world.
If you missed any of the keynotes you can see them all here: http://tv.voicecon.com/
After watching the various keynotes, for me the winner was Microsoft, with Siemens coming in second place (Siemens in fact won the Best of VoiceCon award).
I say this because Microsoft, more than anyone else, communicated a clear, concise vision and tied this vision to real, measurable business benefits.
OCS "14" (aka OCS 2010, aka Microsoft Communication Server 2010, aka MCS 2010) is now clearly positioned, and able, to provide all of the voice, IM, presence, and conferencing capabilities for small, medium and large organizations.
The recent announcements of OCS SIP Trunking support from Verizon, lower cost IP phones that register directly to OCS (from Polycom and Aastra) and gateway devices that support existing SIP phones (Audiocodes and NET) and provide remote branch survivability (HP, Audiocodes, NET, Dialogic) provide good momentum for Microsoft's vision.
OCS 14 as demoed refines the strong capabilities of OCS 2007 R2 and adds support for E911 (location awareness), skills search, refines the Office Communicator interface and generally provides a tool users would like to use.
The demo of extending Microsoft platform to provide a browser-based Silverlight contact centre looked slick and it was nice to hear an actual developer talk about the ability to extend the platform.
The one important place where Microsoft's UC offering is vulnerable is support for mobile devices. With RIM dragging its feet on updating the OC client for the BlackBerry and Microsoft's needing to reboot its mobile phone strategy (Windows 7 phone), this is the one area where Microsoft has a weak spot. However, no vendor really exploited this weakness.
Cisco's demo was good. I love the Cisco flip phone that can shoot video and then plug it into the USB port on the phone (aka a computer disguised as a phone – wonder what one of these handsets will cost?).
The problem was that the central theme around the Intercompany Media Engine (IME) felt like a "been there done that" demo. OCS federation already provides much of the similar capability and I use OCS daily to federate with customers, partners and extended colleagues in a secure, controlled manner. I know Cisco believes there is a unique value proposition associated with IME; however, they did little to demonstrate any uniqueness.
Avaya clearly gets the award for the best use of "big words" and complex sentence structure. Could Kevin Kennedy say disaggregate any more times? And the lesson about "entropy" was interesting if not particularly relevant. (For more entropicality <grin> see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy)
Perhaps a tip, if your slide title takes two lines it is likely too long: "Architecturally Compelling Business User Enablement" (huh?).
Avaya clearly sees SIP as "the one ring (thing) to rule them all" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring for more Lord of the the Rings background). And Avaya clearly wants Avaya Session Manager to be at the core of the "SIP cloud". The trouble is that in some ways they are late to the party. Microsoft OCS has always used SIP as the central core to its communications platform. And in terms of platforms, there are millions of .NET developers who are familiar with the tools needed to extend and enhance the Microsoft OCS and Exchange platforms while the number of Avaya DevConnect partners are measured in thousands.
In the end I agree with Avaya's message that SIP is key and that building a platform with an accessible API is great but I think Microsoft will be able to better capitalize on both the shift to SIP and on exciting a developer community to leverage a platform API.
And what was with the "hypothetical demo"? Haven't we moved past PowerPoint and Flash demos?
Now IBM with Lotus has some good things going on. (Note to Microsoft product team: Spend some time looking at the Lotus platform for a source of good ideas.) In many ways, the Lotus suite of UC and Collaboration products is more refined than the OCS/Exchange/Sharepoint stack; however, certainly in most enterprises Microsoft, through the penetration of Microsoft Office, has captured more mindshare. Almost every CIO I have the opportunity to speak with asks about integrating with the Microsoft platform, even if they are not interested in moving to an entirely Microsoft-powered communications platform. (Although some CIOs of large organization I have talked with are interested in moving to one, centralized communications platform based on Microsoft tools – and OCS 14 makes this much more likely.)
IBM is also wrestling with the shift between supporting third-parties for integration with telephony and voice and, now, looking to build call control functionality into Sametime Unified Telephony in order to simplify the overall solution. Microsoft has already made this transition and as such Microsoft now clearly competes directly with traditional PBX providers. I feel IBM is still trying to play both sides.
While "open" is better in theory, including many pieces in a Communication Solution greatly increases the technical risk and operational complexity and cost – often negating any business value associated with the solution. All things being equal, dealing with fewer vendors is better.
Even with "open" standards, not everything can integrate with everything (See the Integration Myth). Just declaring something "open" does not let existing infrastructure components work with your new applications. (Avaya, IBM and Siemens all pitch this "open" integration approach.)
Interestingly, the Lotus Foundations appliance, which includes everything in a single appliance, is exciting specifically because one vendor (in this case IBM) has created an well integrated solution.
And when IBM speaks of user adoption, which I do believe is key, more users right now are familiar with the Microsoft toolset than with the IBM toolset, so a more straightforward path to user adoption is arguably extending and expanding Microsoft Office, Outlook, and MSN Messenger.
I was confused by IBM video case study where the company spoke about Sametime being better adopted then OCS. Would have liked to understand why this was the case. In my experience both OCS and Sametime provide similar functionality. OCS generally works better in environments that use Outlook/Exchange; Sametime is best in organization who have adopted Notes for messaging.
Mark Straton from Siemens provided a clear and well-presented keynote. He shared some good statistics and reminded people that Siemens while not as established in North America is a leader in worldwide VOIP and is a key provider of software-based voice solutions.
Siemens is also doing some very interesting things using the Amazon cloud, taking steps I would like to see Microsoft undertake to support more virtualized roles, including virtualization of some of the voice and conferencing roles.
I liked how Mark focused on understanding business issues and opportunities as the first step. This is a similar approach I discuss in my Werewolves and UC post.
Siemens also does a good job of showing off integration with social networking platform (such as twitter, linked in and google latitudes). The "tell me when" location based alerts are interesting.
Siemens not surprisingly also talks about building a resilient SIP server. Arguably Siemens has been working at this for longer than Avaya and Microsoft.
Siemens also seems to have a good start building a cloud-based hosted service.
Some good, some bad, some ugly.
In the end, when the dust settled, I still believe the showdown at the VoiceCon Corall went to Microsoft.
If you watched the VoiceCon keynotes, what did you think?
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