UC
In Nemertes’ last unified communications benchmark we asked participants to tell us their biggest challenge in implementing UC. Not surprisingly, more than 58% of IT leaders we interviewed cited “Interoperability” as their chief obstacle to UC success. Interoperability concerns add additional expense, time, and complexity to UC deployments. Despite pledges of support for open standards such as SIP, we continue to hear horror story after horror story from IT leaders related to the lack of interoperability between UC applications. This week a new group appeared with a stated mission of solving the UC interoperability puzzle. Appropriately named the UC Interoperability Forum (UCIF) (http://www.ucif.org), this industry association was founded by HP, Juniper, LifeSize, Logitech, Microsoft, Polycom and is supported by more than a dozen other contributing participants and adopters. The group aims to do for UC for the WiFi alliance did for wireless LANs–develop a program to insure that UC applications easily interconnect. But this group is not without its challenges. Notably absent from the member list are some of the biggest vendors in the voice and UC space, such as Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, IBM Lotus, NEC, and ShoreTel. Also missing are service providers delivering hosted and managed UC applications, and systems integrators (other than HP). The ability of the forum to attract these companies as members is critical to avoiding the impression that the forum is organized more as an alliance of partner vendors trying to compete with non-members, than as an open industry association that any interested party can join. In addition, the forum has potential overlap with other groups promoting interoperability such as the SIPforum as well as standards bodies including the ITU and IETF. Still, the creation of the UCIF represents a positive first step in assuaging the continuing concerns (and costs) related to interoperability challenges in the UC market. UC buyers should keep an eye on its activities while those in the UC marketplace would be well served to get involved.
