Is it the Best of Times or the Worst of Times?
article appearing on the UC Strategies web site.
2010 is the dawn of Unified Communications (UC). In the future, how will we look back on this era?
It will probably be similar to the way Charles Dickens described his era in A Tale of Two Cities. Most people are familiar with the first part of this often quoted passage, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,"
Dickens adds,"it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way."
What were the best of times? That is easy, the dramatic improvements possible by improving employee and business productivity.
Some of the greatest benefits in medicine came from seemingly innocuous advances. The great leap forward was the advent of penicillin. In our industry, the radical leap has been mobility applications and the ability to get voice and emails from a cell phone. While the primary product we offer is typically called messaging, the term itself is actually legacy terminology and an anachronism. What we offer is powerful routing capabilities and an integration of voice, email and fax and the ability to send that information anywhere.
What were the worst of times? Listening to the endless hype and drivel about the promises of UC and how easy it is to deploy. There is a promise of vast improvements that are about to unfold but I have seen similar visions since I entered this industry in 1981. Back then when I started my career at Illinois Bell many of my customers still had cord boards which were actually very effective for the answering service market.
Now even Microsoft is entering the fray claiming the advantages of the software based model of communications and UC. Northern Telecom introduced software controlled phone systems 30+ years ago. Most of the telecommunications industry consists of software based systems and off the shelf hardware (even though it is still usually bundled because there are a lot of kinks yet to be worked out).
It will be interesting to see how long it takes Microsoft to really get communications and telephony right. Delivering these technologies is deceptively complicated with lots of gotchas. Telephony users have expectations shaped by decades of use and expect their equipment to be both highly reliable and intuitive. Microsoft comes from a different world and their core expertise lies elsewhere.
A big problem in introducing technology is in understanding what customers want. One of the reasons that my cord board customer did not want to change was that they hated the idea of giving up the lights that were associated with the status of a phone call. What is more intuitive and natural than that?
From the onset of VoIP, newer technology companies often touted that they were going to give their customers a new experience and that a lot of what customers have been used to was not necessary. Some customers relish change and new capabilities but many do not want a new experience, what they have meets their needs. They are like my former cord board customers who wanted to know at a glance what was going on. Many users still love lights whether they are busy lamp fields or MWI (message waiting indicators that let you know you have a voice mail). They don't want to give them up. Newcomers to our industry like Microsoft, whose product lacks industry standard MWI try to convince people that they don't need it, probably because it is actually pretty difficult to do. Good luck.
Will telecommunications really follow a PC-centric view of the universe and will the PC emerge as the center of voice? There are numerous flaws with this theory. For example, how will users play back voice mail messages through a PC in open cubicle environment, through PC speakers?
Privacy issues, HIPAA, student confidentially and plain common sense are just some of the reason that this is just not realistic. One recent early adopter of Microsoft's UC technology (one of their strategic partners) just had to go out and buy headsets so that employees could listen to their messages. I bet a line item of $50 to $150 for computer headsets never entered into that cost justification model.
Some of our customers have set up task forces to survey their users as to what they want from UC. The usual outcome is muddled. Users do not know what the technology is capable of. This is further complicated because their needs are diverse, and that radically new technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, Google, "the Cloud" and now even SAP appear at a dizzying rate.
Which technologies will have a lasting and revolutionary impact? If I was able to answer that I would be retired already. The only logical business strategy is to make sure that whatever you buy it is flexible and will inter-operate with other vendors' solutions.
Even the promises of UC may not actually materialize. As noted industry analyst Alan Sulkin points out in a recent article, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) held out similar promises as UC back in the early-mid 1990s. There were a plethora of CTI focused trade shows, magazines, analysts and consultants but somehow it all just faded away.
I would never have gone into our industry if I was a pessimist. I think our best days are ahead and that it really is the best of times.