Do We Have The Killer App For Unified Communications (UC)?

The hunt for the Killer App is as old as the hunt for the eternal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Billions of dollars are being poured in every year by Silicon Valley investors in this hunt in areas of disruptive technologies like Virtualization, Unified Communications, Data Centre(Green), Open Source and Social Networking.

Out of the above 5 technology areas, Unified Communications or UC is the most pervasive and is already invading our homes and offices in the form of Net telephony/VoIP communication that is driving telecom and collaboration costs down. It would be worthwhile to take a step back and assess if we have the Killer App driving innovation in this space.

As we well know, UC is not about hardware and software. It is about applications and just that! In this context what would be a Killer App for UC?

It is not too difficult to guess that it would be messaging since the first application to be integrated into hardware and software would be Microsoft Exchange which constitutes the lions share in messaging. In a messaging environment, federation is constituted to be the final frontier in terms of attaining peak Return On Investment (ROI) in UC.It constitutes having single sign on and transparent access across customers, suppliers, partners and other constituents in the corporate ecosystems.

Federation is all about enabling interoperability between multiple and diverse UC environments. This allows for a seamless communications flow between different organizations thus allowing them to collaborate as if they were served by a single platform

While it may seem simple enough, the entire federation process has to be part of what is known as a circle of trust involving security policies, firewalls, VPNs, openness and applications across federating partners. No wonder it is termed as the Mount Everest of identity management and messaging!

In my conversations on UC, CIOs view the federation piece as being the most critical portion of the UC journey since it would help them link with their upstream suppliers and contractors to have a completely transparent supply chain. As Microland moves into creating new competencies around UC and Collaboration and drives deeper relationships with our partners, it is not surprising that our core competencies around messaging are going to drive some of our Go-To-Market strategies. For our networking partners, the first application to be integrated with their networking and voice equipment is going to be messaging ahead of ERP or other customized Retail or Telecom applications.

It is definitely a killer App in the RIMS space and is driving a huge amount of interest and adoption from our customers and partner community

Tags: Federation, Unified Communication

	Author: Partho Dasgupta Parthod
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