Comments on: VoiceCon Orlando: Seven Questions About Unified Communications

By: Bill Miller

Bill Miller — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:58:27 +0000

Yes, we are at VoiceCon and will have some exciting news as well as demonstrating Switchvox SMB 4.0, the web-aware award winning IP PBX. There is also an open source session Tuesday 3/31 at 4 PM that will address open source that according to VoiceCon officials, will be moderated by John Malone from Eastern Management Systems, the research company that created the recent report containing open source market numbers. They published the results on No Jitter’s blog and on their own web site telling the readers that in 2008 18% of all IP lines were open source, over 85% were Asterisk and approx 60% were Digium. We are quite alive and well thank you! Steve Sokol, product manager will attend this session to represent Digium.

I will be presenting at the same time in the ScanSource/Audiocodes presentation theater on “Open Source Asterisk in a Down Economy”

…Bill Miller
VP, Product Management
Digium

By: Rurik Bradbury

Rurik Bradbury — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:42:21 +0000

Unison is not planning a booth, although some of out business development team will be there.

I am intrigued by your definition: by ‘corporate software apps’ do you include email, IM, fax?

To me, the essence of UC is minimizing end user effort and confusion in managing communications — by removing the artificial ring fences that IT has unserendipitously put up over the last 20 years.

The preconditions are in place:
- telephone calls go over IP
- mobile carriers are submitting to IT control (ie smartphone platforms like Windows/Android are being imposed on carriers, rather than vice versa)
- data carriers are dumb pipes, and support voice/video/data comfortably
- desktop PCs and mobile devices are powerful enough to run UC

IT people (and VARs) are holding all the right cards — they just need to make it happen.

By: The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:35:56 +0000

Rurik: Yes, defining Unified Communications is quite a headache. The VAR Guy keeps it simple: UC = VoIP + corporate software applications. Examples like call center, CRM, mobile sales force, presence, etc.

Will Unison be at VoiceCon? Keep The VAR Guy posted on your travels.

Best,
- TVG

By: Rurik Bradbury

Rurik Bradbury — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:30:55 +0000

VoiceCon seems mostly enterprise-focused to me, and large buyers of IT are hurting. Apart from ‘additive’ systems (like an Exchange shop adding OCS) it’s hard to see spending on UC growing rapidly, apart from direct cost-saving measures like basic video conferencing instead of travel.

For SMB, unified communications is still utterly confusing.

My big question for VoiceCon is ‘can anyone define unified communications?’ (I already know the answer: ‘no, because every vendor promotes a different definition, and users are totally confused’). But it’s worth asking.

The term UC is used today in such a wide variety of ways that it is almost so vague as to be meaningless marketingese — ‘agile IT’, ‘the connected enterprise’ etc etc

I tried to clarify 4 flavors of UC in a blog entry here: http://blog.unison.com/2008/12/15/what-does-unified-communications-mean/

I’m afraid Cisco’s ‘unified computing’ will confuse things even more.