* Recent convergence news analyzed
Today, we’d like to discuss how recent announcements from Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, and Verizon point to trends in IP telephony and IP communications.
First, the Cisco and Microsoft press event where Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer emphasized that the two companies will cooperate (as dictated by customer demands) and compete against each other. Our view: This isn’t a big revelation, but the fact that the two CEOs emphatically endorsed the concept speaks to their commitment. We think the same model must also apply even between direct competitors like Avaya vs. Nortel or Microsoft vs. IBM, although we don’t expect such a public “love-fest” from this group of direct competitors. The fact remains that no single vendor has the resources to supply all the best-in-breed features needed for all enterprise IP communications systems.
Second, on IBM’s announcement that it intends to integrate Siemens OpenScape into the Lotus Sametime architecture: As a corollary to our first observation, since IBM doesn’t have the experience or feature set available that is offered by Siemens, it makes sense to use a best-in-class software alternative that gives customers who operate in a Lotus environment a better telephony solution.
Third, on what wasn’t announced but what we expect will be a natural outcome of our first two highlights: Much like Nortel using IBM and Microsoft expertise to supplement the Nortel product development, partnerships help to provide customers with better features more cost effectively. So, we don’t expect that these inter-company partnerships will be diminished in any way.
Fourth, on the IBM announcement to acquire WebDialogs and Verizon’s announced enhancements to its unified communications offer: Sometimes customers find it easier to go to a service provider for certain capabilities and we think that the complexities of unified communications and the feature-rich collaboration feature set enabled by presence-based communications management is an especially ripe opportunity for a hosted and managed service.
Finally, putting our first four points together with comments on some industry trends, we conclude that:
* VoIP is becoming or has become a subset of unified communications, and the next wave of this opportunity to move beyond VoIP is reaching “high tide.”
* As the next battleground, unified communications solutions will see intense competition but also need equally intense cooperation because, among other reasons, unified communication platforms are very software intensive and software can’t operate in a technology vacuum.
* Enterprise customers will need cooperation and expect competition between companies that provide premise-based and hosted collaboration tools, much like how the enterprise views VoIP today.
