Post by Martin Hill-Wilson on 24 April 2008
As The Unified Communication Market Matures The Issue Of Interoperability Takes Centre Stage
Keeping track of the rapid evolution that is taking place in the unified communication market is not easy. It seems there is something new every day. The latest issue that has grabbed everyone’s attention is getting vendor solutions to work together in what everyone has now agreed needs to be a multi vendor ecosystem for unified communications.
This is still very much work in progress. However the willingness in public to achieve this goal was symbolised when IBM and Microsoft agreed to start the process at the recent VoiceCon event. How far this goes is anyones guess but competitive advantage seems to be there for the taking for vendors that take the issue seriously.
Avaya seems to be up for it with their recent announcement of the 1st truly federated presence management solution which is described in greater detail in our technology soluton section.Further initiatives are also in the design pipeline as a recent interview with Mun Yuen Leong, Avaya’s CTO shows. He has broken the interoperability challenge down into three layers:
- The infrastructure layer, where SIP is the key standard;
- The presence federation layer, where SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP are the standards;
- The application layer, where it's SOA and Web Services standards
Looking at this in greater detail, other commentators have identified more specific elements in the interoperability soup namley:
- Number plans
- SIP and QSIG and PRI
- Federation
- Networking diverse PBXs
- Networking diverse voice mail
- Unified Messaging
- User Interfaces
- Mobility voice and data channels
- Communications Management and Reporting tools
In a generation’s time, we will know if the brave new world of unified communication has been built to function universally or only within walled gardens. I’m betting that customers will ultimately decide the issue inspite of vendor reluctance and that interoperability will be a given. In fact the smartest vendors may well have been those that deliver frameworks to make this happen and the most successful deployments will have been those in which full interoperability was top of the evaluation list.
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