Communication improvement Business Process unification communication war is imminent

For me, the VoiceCon exhibition recently held in San Francisco has given the word UC a new meaning. I participated in more than 20 analyst meetings, almost all managers focus on the enterprise's "Unified Communication" strategy and its competitors-"Business Processes empowered by communication" (CEBP. UC and CEBP are the stars of this exhibition, but it is not clear how to implement them. What's more, there seems to be a battle between them.

In recent years, the battle for IP phones is still in full swing. One party is a long-established PBX vendor-Alcatel, Avaya, Nortel Network, Siemens, the other is the "new" VoIP vendor Cisco, Shoretel, and a series of unnamed small companies. Today, Microsoft has also joined the IP phone or Unified Communication Battle Group with its Office communication server OCS) 2007 in a high profile.

Microsoft introduced OCS 2007 and its client Office Communicator 2007 in detail during the one-hour product demonstration that was clearly not considered as the keynote speech of this exhibition, this system basically eliminates the dependency on legacy "hardware-based" systems.

This reminds me that this kind of thing that no longer relies on the PBX hardware has never appeared before. A few years ago, the PBX system was generally running proprietary software on proprietary hardware, and this era was over. Traditional vendors have transplanted all important system components to open hardware and operating system platforms. All vendors can provide so-called "soft phones" that can be used on normal PCs, while VoIP "hard" phones are not so much software as hardware.

After reading Microsoft's presentation, I talked with a manager from Avaya. When I asked him about the impact of Microsoft's PBX strategy on them, they replied that there was no impact. Why? They believe that CEBP will defeat Unified Communication. The reason is: the integration of the so-called "common" function provided by unified communication. For example, clicking the name of a person in the Outlook Address Book can call someone and so on. CEBP can provide more meaningful value-added services.

Avaya and other PBX vendors said that CEBP can allow various communication tools to be directly integrated into business processes. Avaya provides the case of Black & Decker, using Avaya's CEBP solution, the company uses the Text Speech reading function to allow computers to answer customers' product usage and repair problems.

Although it is hard to prove which method is more valuable, I don't think they will win. In the past, the battlefield between the two was very limited. For example, when an IP phone appears, competition mainly occurs between the old-style line PBX "telephone" department and IT department. As server virtualization progresses, competition often occurs between the server team and the data center infrastructure team.

When Unified Communication/CEBP appears, on the battlefield, the IP Phone team moved from the teams responsible for messaging and server strategies in the enterprise to the application teams that program the daily business applications of the enterprise. What's more, where the war happened may decide who will be the winner.

If the "CEBP" strategy can truly drive communications technology, traditional telephone manufacturers will have a great opportunity. However, based on past experience, IT infrastructure can often provide services to application teams in a more timely manner than telephone manufacturers. If this is the case, it is very likely that the world of unified communications will be the world of Microsoft Communications before people notice it.

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