I’m beginning to wonder if the key isn’t interoperability, but interworking. nteroperability would be the ability to plug any SIP/IP communications device into any other, and have them work together. That’d be terrific, of course, but it’s more complicated than just presence federation–and presence federation is pretty complicated, itself. Interworking would be at once a more modest and potentially more useful goal. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to be communicating over diverse overlay networks–not just a mix of TDM- and IP-based communications in the enterprise, but more importantly, public cellular as well. If an enterprise could tie together all of these diverse components, it could exercise greater control over its cellular costs (and assets, such as phone numbers) and provide more efficient communications to its mobile workforce. The core of such an interworked systems is…well, it’s a PBX, probably an IP-PBX.

I blogged briefly on Johan Krebbers’ keynote address at last week’s VoiceCon Amsterdam; I focused on the issue of information sharing and collaboration at Royal Dutch Shell, but I want to revisit some of the core communications issues. The big headline out of the speech was Krebbers’ assertion that at Shell, voice is no more important than the other peer-to-peer real-time media. In his talk, Krebbers elaborated, saying that within Shell today, if you travel, you’re encouraged to use a softphone to save on international dialing; the expectation is that you’ll become comfortable enough with the softphone that you’ll be willing to use it when you’re in the office as well.

Greetings from beautiful Amsterdam, where our first-ever European VoiceCon event is wrapping up its first day. The big news from today was Microsoft’s announcement of Release 2 of Office Communications Server (OCS), but there was plenty going on all day as we crammed tutorials, keynotes and exhibits into a lovely autumn Tuesday in the Netherlands.

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.

Don Brown, Interactive Intelligence’s chairman, president and CEO, told me he wants to compete against the likes of BEA and Ultimus in providing programming tools that automate business processes, instead of just communications-enabling those processes. In Brown’s view of things, communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) “undershoots the potential” of the cluster of technologies that are typically deployed first in the contact center, which is the marketplace where Interactive Intelligence has its historic strength.