The Seven Blind Men and the Future of Unified Communications

Note: This post is written and submitted by my good friend and colleague, Del Miller. You can reach Del at <delmiller@earthlink.net> .

Perhaps you’ve heard the tale of the elephant and the seven blind men who touch it and variously describing it as a snake, a tree, a leaf, etc., in a forgivable error considering their limited viewpoint and whatever part of the beast each is examining. It seems to me that, as an industry, we have been examining the prospective path of unified communications rather blindly and we don’t know whether we have an elephant here or an octopus. As the various spheres of our technical world are said to converge on a SIP mediated suite of slick, compatible telecom, videoconferencing and datacom, we turn around to find that implementation is more often a jigsaw puzzle of translation tricks to make it all actually, you know, work.

Despite the deeply generous use of the word “unified,” the promise of all this unification seems a bit out of reach, as “standard” yet “annoyingly incompatible” protocols proliferate like bunnies at the various vendors and within various industries. Depending on whether your point of view is from videoconferencing, infrastructure, telephony or the consumer sphere, your approach to unified communication may differ wildly from your brother UC’ers.

When your only tool is a hammer...
If you come from an infrastructure company the obvious market move would be to design and sell a vast fleet of routers and call switching fabric that includes the ability to translate between all the species of SIP protocols variously implemented by everybody else in the world. Besides forcing compatibility among the incompatible, you would have built-in gateways, firewalls, translators and PBX interfaces. All of this would be advertised to solve all UC problems and would, of course, be priced to match. Assuming that the rest of the planet, including its dominant lifeform, is merely a support system for enterprise IT, then this approach makes sense. But why do we really need a back-office solution to unified communications when the whole point of UC is to standardize protocols so that we don’t need to translate between everyone?

If, on the other hand, you are a VOIP vendor driving the SIP bandwagon you may see the entire premise of unified communication as simply a larger, grander and decidedly more lucrative phone system, with videoconferencing systems and cellphones tacked onto the phone network like reminders on a corkboard. Of course, you might end up with less of a unified communication system and more of a phone system with fiendishly difficult to configure peripherals.

If, on yet another hand, you are a videoconferencing endpoint manufacturer you will likely take one of two approaches. One, you will lobby your customers to replace the old H.323 equipment to give it the ability to handle SIP calls or, two, you will attempt to sell pricey H.323 to SIP gateways upstream of the existing installed endpoints to avoid obsoleting current investment. Convincing you customers that this added expense will provide improvement beyond the H.323 product that you just sold them might be a sales exercise of the refrigerator/eskimo variety, but hey, it’s the price of progress ain’t it?

Cellphone Sideshow
Cellphone carriers will, if history repeats, just be confused, afraid and borderline schizoid. Their smartphones already have WiFi hardware so tossing in a few pounds of SIP protocols will be the minimum required to stay competitive with each other. But every SIP enabled handset is a handset that needs the celltowers less and less. As SIP mediated messaging begins to offer customers a chance to call, text and videoconference with each other without phone charges the carriers are likely to reconsider their generosity and start making their SIP offerings more restrictive. Imagine an ever increasing solution set for digital communication combined with carrier mandated data caps that makes the whole offering impractical if not entirely counter-productive. Yes, that would be foolish, which is why we can bet on it with near certainty.

Cellphone manufacturers will be only slightly more confused than the carriers, since any problems that the carriers have with unified communications will be efficiently served down the food chain. However, handset manufacturers face even more problems in trying to turn a new technology into a solution of consumer level ease of use, since the telephone industry has been entirely satisfied to make them complicated and difficult. The primary method for making this happen is by crowbarring a PC operating system into a dedicated communication device, bolting on some SIP protocols and praying to whichever deity that claims responsibility for completing phone calls.

Oh yes, let’s get the PC guys in here, too
And finally you have the Gang of Three: Microsoft, Apple and Google. Now, I’m sure that a casual stroll through the headquarters of each of these companies would reveal that a VOIP phone adorns nearly every desk; that their data centers are packed full of SIP capable hardware handling their PBX function; that conference rooms have a variety of videoconferencing endpoints; that the PCs on every employee’s desk are loaded with dozens of web conferencing software required to talk to one another; and that the building is a veritable beehive of cellphone toting individuals-a good percentage of which could videoconference with each other in some form or another. In fact there is no way that the top management of these companies could be unaware of the vast and wonderful business potential of honest-to-god, unified communication.

Yet…these companies and their partners have all produced mobile/desktop video communication solutions that more or less ignore existing UC infrastructure and have decided to instead foist non-interoperable solutions upon the industry in a remarkably obvious and totally predictable attempt at customer lock-in. Skype, in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, is not interoperable with Microsoft’s own Lync or Messenger Live video options; so you can imagine the chances that it would play well with Apple’s Facetime, for instance. Google Voice has gone its own way as well. None of them have paid much attention to existing videoconferencing standards much less to the standards that their competitors use. So, from 30,000 feet “Unified” communication means…well, pretty much anything but unified. If you want to bring an iPhone/Facetime user into your videoconference it will require workarounds, additional software and the repeated leaping through a series of flaming configuration hoops. And this is all happening in a world where everything is supposedly using the same protocols.

SIP flows downhill…
Way down at the bottom of this hierarchy of confusion sits the customer: Wondering why his phone can’t dial into a videoconference like it used to; why there are fifty different web conferencing solutions and as many messaging applications and why half a million dollars in infrastructure equipment upgrades yields a new SIP based telephone system that works pretty much the same as the old one. The customer is also wondering whether he should upgrade his videoconferencing systems with SIP gateways or instead just buy new systems that handle both H.323 and SIP. Oh, and then there are all those cellphones from different vendors trying to message and videoconference with each other.

Now, one fall-back answer to this Babel-ish situation is to just let Cisco handle it. Cisco is already putting together its future SIP infrastructure offerings and a key feature is the ability to translate the various incarnations of SIP, cell and landline information into some semblance of voice and video compatibility. But the considerable costs involved in forcing compatibility from within the equipment room may prove to be a mighty big and iffy investment when the standards for endpoints and the mobile UC world are still in flux. Throwing big money at a moving target might prove an unsatisfactory solution if the standards continue their vague, genetic drift from one vendor to the next. Alternatively, if Polycom and Microsoft and Google and Apple and the other vendors in the game should eventually work out their protocol differences, then perhaps the equipment room need not radically change in the first place. Then what was the point?

Perhaps this grand unification will take place only to find that we haven’t really got a use case. Do we really need full videoconferencing from our cellphones? Will heavily architected infrastructure solutions really be better than, say, using a cellphone vendor’s out-of-the-box cloud solution? I mean, the enterprise has been happy as pigs to let BlackBerry handle the messaging load with their own servers so why not let Apple and Microsoft take care of their communication offerings with their own cloud solutions and just forget all about handling it internally. Here in the day of “The Consumerization of IT,” will we find that as our communications become more digital, that our infrastructure will become more cloud-like and consequently, we need less of that infrastructure? And in this “five new technologies per day, crazy mergers & acquisitions and occasional bankruptcy” world, which vendors are even going to be around?

Grand Unification
Now, I have to admit that this chaos is largely unavoidable when any industry undergoes such rapid and massive change. Further, standards are difficult to hammer out in the best of situations but when you throw giant companies from several only vaguely related industries together to work on “compatibility” you can naturally expect the sort of market ADHD that we are now seeing. And I fully expect most of these issues to be ironed out over the next couple/few/several years as standards accrete and as mergers and acquisitions resolve incompatibilities through sheer vendor attrition; ultimately yielding a telematic future of science fiction scale awesomeness. But what do we do now? How do we choose the best UC path to take when we’re still juggling all the balls in the air?

It is said that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. As it turns out, that’s the best way to eat an octopus too.

NOTE: H323 TEST SITES HAS MOVED!

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