I am at Interop this week at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Probably one of the largest Business Tech Fests in North America, Interop served this year as a love-in for Unified Communications, all UC all the time. John Chambers (Cisco), Mike Zafirovski (Nortel), Louis D’Ambrosio (Avaya) all keynoted the importance of Unified Communications and the where to from here for UC. Chambers was quick to tout Video as the next big break through and it was no coincidence that Video is also a bandwidth sucking application. Zafirovski emphasized the progress that Nortel has made restructuring the business and most of the presentation was on the way forward for Nortel including specifically the unified communications space and the Microsoft alliance. Louis from Avaya was very upbeat about Avaya’s position in the marketplace for their offerings. He was quick to label Avaya as the open platform that can run on any network including their close partner Juniper. Walking the floor, the big guys held the front section, especially the network vendors, Extreme and Foundry to name a few. The key messaging was getting your network (be it fixed or wireless) ready for voice and video as an application. There was some very interesting smaller players including Splunk> (Ethical Disclosure: I received a T Shirt for listening to the pitch) a search engine for log files on the network. It was positioned as a Quality of Service Tool that allows you to aggregate and analyze all of the log files you may have. One of the challenges coming out of Interop is the how and why of unified communications. Many companies have different views of UC, including Cistera, and what it looks like in an implementation. UC is rather like the old saying “I can tell you what it is but I know it when I see it”. The question de jour is then what is it going to take to mainstream UC and when can we expect to see it….
