Interoperability & Integration: The Call is NowInteroperability & Integration: The Call is Now

Everyone's been talking about the need for interoperability and integration lately--a rally that got a jump start at VoiceCon, when Microsoft and IBM had their now infamous handshake on the issue, and which has been gaining momentum ever since.Of course, interoperability and integration are not the same thing. Integration is the easier problem to solve, although in order to do that, vendors will have to let go of their proprietary codecs, and SIP will have to continue to improve as a useable standard. Since unified communications is all about connecting applications on the back end so that they're more easily accessible on the front end, it goes without saying that integration is a key component of UC. And since very few large and mid-size organizations have single-vendor infrastructures for all their voice, video and data needs, that integration has to be enabled among a variety of (well, really all conceivable) vendors.Interoperability is different--it's about making it so that two or more applications can share information with one another, without their having to be connected in any way. My e-mail and your e-mail are interoperable, but we have done nothing on the back end to tie them together in any way (I don't even know what system you use). Interoperability is important for voice and video calls, for instance, so that when I place one I am sure that you will receive it. But today, its critical point of failure is around presence. Ideally, our presence information (both PC and telephone) would be accessible to anyone, regardless of what system they're using.Today, some vendors and service providors offer "federation" for presence information. If your company and my company agree, we can do the work to get our presence systems to share information on our availability states (which is easier when we both use products from the same vendor, although many vendors actually offer federation with other vendors' systems as well). But in a more perfect world, that information would be available to everyone without anyone having to do anything to make it work.Neither integration nor interoperability is without its technical challenges, but the real roadblocks here relate to business and cultural issues. On the integration front, near-sighted vendors are trying to hold on to clients as best they can, locking them into a single, end-to-end solution--which is weird, because when you talk to vendors about the issue, they all swear they want to give customers choice and freedom, and they clearly recognize that most of their customers don't have single-vendor solutions now and probably never will.Interoperability is a bit more difficult, because it requires rethinking not just business models but also the pros and cons of openess. As we all know, the e-mail model has its flaws: viruses and spam. Add the complexities of real-time communications and location/availability data (who can see you, and where you are?), and we really need to tread carefully into the future.But tread we must.