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Last week, Jim Burton wrote a piece entitled, “UC: It’s Not About Buying a New IP-PBX.” I agree with Jim, which is usually the smart thing to do, but at least to me–Jim may disagree–his mantra doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy a new IP-PBX. It’s just that the IP-PBX is not synonymous with Unified Communications.

I fully agree with Jim’s complaint that IP-PBX vendors are trying to grandfather their core systems into the status of “Unified Communications” equipment, because UC is the buzzword of the moment. If allowed to get away with it, vendors will call a basic PBX-voice implementation a “UC” system, with X number of end stations of “UC” installed–when in fact those end stations are what you and I would refer to as “telephones.”

And yet, that statement in itself is problematic. Is a Microsoft Tanjay phone–which Polycom, LG-Nortel and others are OEMing–not a UC station? It’s a phone, but it runs a UC client. Or what about a user who has the classic implementation that UC people have been talking about–they get a relatively simple IP phone for high-quality voice when they’re at the desk, but they also have a soft client and/or various telephony hooks into business apps on their PC. Is that person 1 UC station, or 2, or 3?

There’s no reason that you, as a customer, need to care about how vendors count UC ports, except to understand that these games will be what’s lurking behind the UC market numbers you’re likely to see coming out. Probably every vendor that answers your RFP will tell you they’re the market leader in UC, and will have some numbers or market research study to back up that claim.

But I digress. The issue is, given the fact that IP-PBX does not equal UC, should you forget about IP-PBXs?

I don’t think so. In his article, Jim cites Blair Pleasant’s list of the components of a UC solution, which are:

• Presence
• Messaging–IM, email, voice, video
• Communications–Voice, data, video, VoIP/SIP, CTI
• Conferencing–Web, audio, video
• Information sharing–web chat, file sharing, document sharing
• Business processes, applications, directories
• Common user experience–Portal, desktop, mobility, speech
• Rules engine–Business rules, priorities, and permissions for routing, notification, and other tasks

And Jim notes that this list does not include IP-PBXs. But on the other hand, you have to ask yourself: Could you run your business today only on products that are commercially available in these categories?

The answer is no. Today, the voice communications aspect of your business runs on PBX features, and those features don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re not just sitting on the phone or the PBX waiting for somebody to pick them up and play with them. They’re built into your (dare I say it) business processes, as I noted awhile back in an Information Week blog (”You’ve Already Got Communications-Enabled Business Processes” ).

As Jim suggests, the UC way of handling business processes is potentially much more efficient and cost-effective, which is why we’re having this whole migration in the first place. But we’re not there yet.

Incidentally, Allan Sulkin–who’s squared off against Jim Burton in many VoiceCon Locknote sessions over the years–has an excellent feature up on No Jitter (”PBX Evolution: Where It Was, Where It Is, & Where It’s Going“) tracing the evolution of the PBX, and the revealing thing is that Allan does see the PBX fading away and being replaced by what he calls the Federated Communications System. But he sees this being a gradual process, and one that’s as much tied to what goes on in the public network as it is to other factors.

So here’s my bottom line: Enterprises need to understand what they mean by Unified Communications, and then they need to press the vendors for specifics on whether those vendors can deliver that set of capabilities.

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

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Architecture, Equipment, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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