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.
Attendance was especially strong in the Unified Communications sessions, which certainly isn’t new at VoiceCon, but it has led Fred Knight and I to finally conclude that UC is the core of the conference, not just a technology overlay on the voice over IP that dominated a few years ago. I don’t think anyone thinks about deploying an IP-PBX anymore without asking themselves, “Then what?” Not everyone has an answer yet, but knowing that there needs to be an answer may be what will motivate people to keep coming to VoiceCon. At least that’s what Fred and I are going to shoot for.
Phil Fasano was well positioned to give a business-level view of communications technology in his VoiceCon San Francisco keynote this morning. Fasano is senior VP and CIO at Kaiser Permanente, and he said at the outset that “information technology is the differentiator” in the health care market, where Kaiser uses technology to drive prevention, which in turn is the engine of cost reduction for health care providers.
Microsoft’s entry to the market has changed the way enterprise communications decision-makers look at their choices for the future, so it made sense that the software giant brought a couple of customers along with its own keynoter on the first conference day of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, for a discussion of how the enterprise should organize and prioritize for the changes that Unified Communications will bring.
Judging by the breakdown in morning tutorial attendance, the big concerns among our attendees haven’t changed: People gravitated to Brent Kelly’s updated session comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 with IBM Lotus Sametime; they also went for David Bryan’s SIP Tutorial, which once again got great reviews; and our new tutorial, with Nemertes Research examining business cases for IP telephony and Unified Communications, was another strong draw.
