VoiceCon: It's The Apps Stupid!VoiceCon: It's The Apps Stupid!

If one wasn't convinced that the landscape surrounding VOIP and real-time collaboration has rapidly changed in the last year consider the major announcements out of VoiceCon this week in Orlando:

- Avaya introduced its development platform for delivery of communications-enabled business processes to allow enterprises to integrate business processes with communications services.  For example, Avaya's software would allow a business event to automatically trigger a communications session.

- Cisco and IBM announced a partnership whereby Cisco will migrate its unified communications client to the Lotus sametime platform and embrace Lotus's vision for unified communication and collaboration

- IBM further announced plans to open source its client, enabling third-party developers to have direct access to source code, Litescape announced that it was open sourcing its UC client as well

- Microsoft shook-up the VOIP market by sharing its vision of a future based on desktop communications applications integrated with application servers rather than one based on phones and IP-PBXs.  Microsoft further stated its vision would lead to huge reductions in the cost of deploying enterprise VOIP

As I noted last week, for those who remember when VoiceCon was "the PBX show", these announcements are astounding.  And, it's worth noting that while we had a number of announcements of enhanced phone systems, most vendors used VoiceCon to announce initiatives such as enabled mobile access to telephony features, and expanded unified communications capabilities.

I had the opportunity to talk to a number of enterprise attendees about their reaction to what they saw this week.  Most were excited about the opportunities enabled by UC to improve personal productivity and enterprise communications, but they were also grounded in the reality that their organizations just aren't ready, and probably won't be ready for some time, to make any deployment decisions.  They still need to get the right internal organizaiton in place, and they need to build business justifications for deployment.

But still there's evidence of enterprise movement.  Royal Dutch Shell presented a keynote in which they discussed their plan to phase out traditional telephony systems in favor of a communications environment based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.  Other enterprise representatives presented similar plans, but often to a lessor extend.  While I didn't get to attend the Merril Lynch keynote, I was told the speaker noted they would implement click-to-call capabilities from within Microsoft Office, but had no plans to integrate voice, and instant messaging into a unified presence-enabled client experience.

Finally, there a growing discussion of the role of open source in unified communications.  I had the opportunity to moderate two panels on open source, including one which featured Bill Miller of Digium and Peter St. Andre of Jabber.  One of the most interesting questions that came out of the audience was one that asked when various open source projects such as Open Office, Asterisk, and Zimbra would come together to create an open source alternative to unified communications solutions from the large vendors.  One attendee wondered if the same barriers between groups between enterprises also exist in the open source community, and how they can be overcome to create a true integrated open source UC suite.

Overall VoiceCon was a week well spent, and one which provided a great deal of food for thought as we get ready for the Enterprise 2.0 event this summer in Boston.  It's obvious the landscape is changing, it's also obvious there are ample and growing opportunities to change it further in the years ahead.