Our industry is at another one of those critical turning points that produce customer confusion, product discontinuity and vendor disorientation. If one analyzes Microsoft’s recent comments regarding its alliance with Nortel, this is just the beginning of a trend to integrate communications applications under the umbrella of the operating system and enablement middleware.
In the software industry, middleware is a general term for any program used to “glue together” or mediate between two, often distributed programs. For example, middleware provides messaging services so different applications can communicate. Extrapolation of this concept to the telephony industry is self-evident: Two distributed-client applications (for example, telephones or softphones) communicate using digitized voice signaling. Take this one step further under the application banner of unified communications, and we now have multimedia clients using middleware-over-IP and Session Initiation Protocol to communicate.
Microsoft (with Exchange) and IBM (with Notes) are significant players in the world of collaborative software. In the future, that software will not be limited to textual documents or data for collaboration but will be fully enabled for multimedia collaboration. Standards-based middleware will let independent software vendors (ISV) develop corporate applications that integrate voice, video, document and Web conferencing, collaboration, instant messaging, and mail messaging with Exchange, Notes or any service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based application.
Where does this leave traditional communications applications vendors, such as Nortel, Avaya and Cisco? IT history may hold the key to what will occur if these vendors do not evolve into service-oriented ISVs. Two classic examples exist of disintermediation in software evolution: Novell with NetWare and Netscape with its Web browser. Both companies suffered the fate of a slow, corporate death spiral when faced with competition from Microsoft embedding the same features and functionality as middleware within Windows.
Over time the migration of communications applications to middleware will be slow but steady. Adoption rates will be similar to changing from analog PBXs to digital PBXs to IP PBXs with VoIP. Nortel intends to accelerate this rate of conversion by becoming the integrator of choice for Microsoft’s Unified Communications applications software. Unfortunately, Nortel is starting almost at ground zero with respect to a services organization and faces significant competition from not only classic communications services competitors, such as Avaya, Alcatel and Siemens, but also IT services giants, such as IBM and Electronic Data Systems.
The phenomenon of applications migration into middleware also will occur within management and security software. These three industries are symbiotic within the IT world. Over time, as standards progress and business process-based SOAs are implemented, the need for bundled communications, security and management middleware will be a requirement rather than the exception.
Corporate customers will not be the only ones feeling the impact of communications applications’ migration to middleware. Service providers probably will feel the impact first. The old concept of multiple Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operational Support Systems (OSS) within a service provider is passé. The integration of these two systems into a single SOA-based application structure will occur sooner rather than later.
As more communications services become software-oriented using IP Multimedia Subsystem-based applications, their existence as middleware rather than applications will become an issue. The concept of a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) as the interface point between the collapsed BSS/OSS applications and the communications infrastructure is a hot industry topic. As the SDP concept evolves, it is becoming evident that the SDP can provide all the middleware services, including what were once thought of as infrastructure service applications.
Lucent, Alcatel and Nortel, beware: You, too, may have a nightmare of new IT competitors – IBM, Oracle, BEA and others – at your doorstep.
