* Adding value to VoIP with ‘presence’ technology
During his keynote address at the recent Internet Telephony show in Los Angeles, Lucent Worldwide Services president John Meyer acknowledged that VoIP alone doesn’t necessarily equate to “value over IP.”
By itself, he conceded, VoIP is a replacement for traditional phone calls, which is why many carriers have dragged their feet in offering it. His keynote set the stage for several demos and discussions surrounding emerging presence-enabled services and applications, which add value to VoIP networks.
Companies like Lucent and Dynamicsoft (recently purchased by Cisco) build infrastructure components to enable carriers to offer presence services. Meanwhile, 3Com successfully demonstrated a slick new enterprise presence application called the 3Com Convergence Applications Suite at the show during a special “Killer Apps” event.
Presence offerings converge VoIP, data, video, instant messaging (IM) and location tracking on top of wired and wireless networks to display, in an application, the whereabouts and status of a user’s colleague (“available,” “traveling,” “on vacation,” “on mobile phone”). You can click on that user’s entry to set up an instant message, mobile call, VoIP call, or even a videoconference. You just click, drag and drop to set up these sessions.
Much of the latest work is based on Session Initiation Protocol for IM and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), a mechanism for subscribing to, and being notified of, changes in a user’s state on a SIP network. One use for SIMPLE is to create a user status list similar to an IM “buddy list,” which is then extended to embrace these other forms of communication.
The applications demoed at the show were engaging. But to be successful in businesses, presence apps will require end-user training, and managers must set expectations about how they are to be used. Presence puts control in the hands of end users over their communications – a good thing, provided users have the time, wits, and inclination to pay such close attention to detail.
If the user is at his desk but on a deadline, is he “available,” just because he is not traveling, in a meeting or home with the flu? Is he required to constantly update his status? How much time will this take? What are the consequences if he doesn’t?
These are management, not technology issues, and they should be thought through before applications are deployed.
