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It’s tutorial day at VoiceCon Spring 2007, the kickoff of our week here in Orlando. We always look at where the attendees go for the morning tutorials, to try and see if it tells us anything about where the industry is going. This year, the answer seems to be-everywhere: Attendance was almost completely balanced among all the sessions, running the gamut from basics of VOIP to Microsoft LCS integration. Which seems to jibe with the conversations I’ve been having with a range of enterprise users over the past year. Most enterprises are doing VOIP to some extent, but most still feel they have plenty to learn about the protocols (like SIP) and concepts (like unified communications or UC) that have emerged as key issues for the future.

UC promises to be one of the hot topics over the next three days. Our consultant/analyst friends at UCStrategies.com define UC as “communications integrated to optimize business processes;” the basic idea is to wed the communications infrastructure-what we used to call the voice and data networks and systems-to the applications that run the business.

All of the leading PBX vendors are trying to position themselves as the ones to help you handle this integration, and Avaya was quick out of the gate this morning with the announcement of Communications Process Manager. Avaya tends to highlight the term “communications enabled business processes” or CEBP, but they’re talking about something similar to the UC definition above.

The Communications Process Manager talks SIP to the communications infrastructure (via a gateway if necessary), and talks Web Services to the applications. Jim Hickey, director of communications enablement solutions at Avaya, calls the business-communications linkage “the last unconverged space,” and he says the reason for now converging this space is to make business processes more efficient and eliminate “human latency.”

“Human latency” is another buzzword you’ll be hearing more of; it refers to the requirement for people to take in communications about a business process and then act on it, or else relay the information to someone else. The idea is to use communications to connect these processes to eliminate this step of “human latency.” Hickey says of communications systems today, “The default condition when they encounter a need for human interaction is to stop.”

Hickey concedes it’s a challenge for enterprise organizations to bring together the IT, communications and line of business decision-makers who must, together, drive the adoption of this new technology layer. He said it’s clearly a long term process.

But it’s not a process that necessarily requires 100 percent VOIP on that infrastructure layer. That’s a big challenge for the traditional PBX and IP-PBX vendors. Microsoft’s entry into this market means the incumbent vendors can no longer focus solely on selling IP-based call control. Microsoft’s pitch is that you don’t need IP-telephony to do UC/CEBP, a perspective with which Avaya’s Jim Hickey agreed.

We’ll doubtless hear lots more about UC and CEBP as the conference keynotes and breakout sessions get under way tomorrow. Lou D’Ambrosio, Avaya’s CEO, will open Tuesday’s program, followed by Mike Zafirovski, CEO of Nortel. After hearing from the vendors, we’ll get the view from the user side, when Johan Krebbers, group IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell, takes the stage.

I’ll join you here to tomorrow to report on what they say.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review
VoiceCon Program Chair

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Posted in Applications, Management, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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