Reflecting on the Communications Renaissance at VoiceCon 2009

Starting off with my presentation Monday morning and carried through Gurdeep Singh Pall’s Wednesday morning, VoiceCon sponsors, attendees, and media have now been briefed with what we call the Communications Renaissance. What does this actually mean? Well, it’s quite simple. We have now seen the rise of software-based communications services with most of the major players in this space; Microsoft leading the way. So once every major communications provider has a software-based PBX series of softphone clients and other software-driven services, what becomes the differentiating factor? Well if I was a painter in the Renaissance period I would want to have a palette in which to work with and a unique set of oils and colors to create my personal masterpiece. So if we relate Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, Mitel, Nortel, Shortel, you name it to the actual piece of wood, how do I create a compelling voice solution? I need a unique set of oils and colors. In a software-driven communications marketplace, this means applications. So, who is the organization with the largest developer community worldwide? Who can equip a wide range of developers who develop non-pc or mobile solutions with the painting tools necessary to create a rich set of communications applications? The answer is simple until Apple enters the game; the answer is Microsoft. After the race to deploy the best software-based PBX is complete, the winning mixture will be which manufacturer offers a non-proprietary (I say this when I speak of Avaya who provides a cool OneX platform, but not so cool when you’re a developer trying to integrate or build anything on the platform) software + services vision? Not Cisco, not Nortel, not …., etc. Microsoft owns this space. With the Microsoft Unified Communications platform APIs and SDKs, millions of developers worldwide will be able to create and sell (direct or through a reseller model) an AppStore of voice and unified communications worth of unique line-of-business or cross horizontal set of applications which is already becoming a deciding factor in an organization’s purchasing decision.