Presence is hot. Service providers want to offer it. Pundits say it will revolutionize business processes. And vendors of products from security platforms to collaboration suites to IP telephony say their offerings are “presence-enabled.” But what, exactly, is presence?
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” She replies, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Great question, particularly when the word is “presence.”
Presence is hot. Service providers want to offer it. Pundits say it will revolutionize business processes. And vendors of products from security platforms to collaboration suites to IP telephony say their offerings are “presence-enabled.”
But what, exactly, is presence?
In a nutshell, presence is the ability to provide real-time context about a user. What sort of context? Depends on whom you ask. Vendors and service providers with roots in traditional telephony define context as primarily about physical location and reachability. Location-based services provide information to users based on their physical locations (think 911 call centers or the OnStar satellite service). Here, context means geography.
A variant of this definition includes the type of end device from which the user is currently reachable. For example, Mitel Networks offers an HP Ipaq-based IP phone that lets the IP PBX know when it’s docked at the desktop. Calls automatically can be routed to the user’s desktop phone. But when the user pockets the Ipaq to go downstairs to the cafeteria, calls are routed to the Ipaq.
Similarly, AOL Instant Messaging and other consumer IM services route IMs to user cell phones when people are not at their desks. In these examples, context is not about where you are, but how you can be reached.
A third definition involves who you are and what you know. This is used in call centers that feature skills-based routing. Calls are routed to agents who can address specific inquiries. In newer, presence-equipped customer-contact centers, an agent might request support from experts in a particular field. Such experts are listed as individual IM groups.
Finally, vendors of software collaboration suites view context as what users are doing. Are they composing a memo in Word? Accessing an accounting module in SAP? Writing code? To these vendors, the ability to locate someone engaged in a particular project or working within an application is what context is all about.
The upshot is that virtually every major vendor is offering presence-enabled collaboration. As they do, they’re trespassing onto each other’s turf. For example, collaboration suite vendors view voice as an add-on to their collaboration solutions, while IP telephony vendors see collaboration applications as an add-on to theirs.
This tees up an unusual competitive constellation in what we’re calling the “presence wars.” Software players (think Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and IBM) are going head-to-head against network vendors (Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens).
Who will win? It is too early to call. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty,” which is to be master – that’s all.”
