Enterprise Communications

Forget It!

by Dave Michels

I am currently at GlueCon – that makes this Spring very heavy for conferences, this being number five. Things become blurry. And I have come to a conclusion about all of these events, It isn’t what you learn. It’s what you forget.

Allow me to clarify.

There is plenty of new stuff. I have a long queue of things to write about from all these shows. There are amazing new offerings, products, and companies of definite interest. But there is plenty of equally interesting things to forget.

I need to forget about TDM and its associated baggage such as faxes, POTS, PRI, and T1.Forget CTI. CallerID is the new CTI.

Forget about the office or office hours.

Forget immobility or whatever the term is for the opposite of mobility.

Forget out of office responders. Forget using travel as an excuse for being non responsive.

Forget about Bottom-up design. Start with the process requirements, not the device. I know decision makers that selected a voice system based on the preferred phones – that model won’t work any more.

Forget great quality, good enough is fine.

Forget Convergence: Convergence meant mixing voice and data traffic on the same network. Too simple. Think Overlay, or layers as in “overlay real time voice conversations on the backbone”.

Forget maintenance, it’s assurance now and the hardware isn’t covered.

Forget mutually exclusive decisions: on-premise means no cloud, softphones means no hard phones, SIP means no H.323, and so on. Voice is becoming a long tail proposition with an abundance of options and permutations.

One other key observation
The term “The Cloud” is spoken regularly at every conference I attended, but it means something differently at each of these events.

  • VoiceCon: the Cloud generally refers to private clouds where an enterprise can run their voice system on owned servers using hyper-visor technology AKA virtualization.
  • Ecomm: Cloud services as tools for specific problems to solve or specialized applications. Also popular topic at Ecomm was volcanic cloud conversations.
  • UCSummit The cloud generally referred to as hosted voice.
  • Google Atmosphere: The cloud refers to browser based public services – voice only mentioned as a related concept such as Google Voice or Android.
  • GlueCon: The cloud is a world of APIs accessible over the Internet.

These different point of views make conversations a bit of a challenge as they require an initial level set. Depending on the forum, the cloud is either trusted or untrusted, friendly or hostile, and reliable or unreliable.