Communications Future

[rogerg]

Not too far from now, SIP will become the native / dominant signaling protocol for all communications. While this is happening, Social Networking and cloud based business applications will continue to evolve. The net result will be a single interface or dashboard that allows for:

• Groups / Teams based on business goals / projects, etc.. You select your group / team link, then people subscribed to that group / team appear (think Facebook).
• Instant business document collaboration (think googlewave) for the group or team.
• Click to Voice, Video, IM instantly with members of your group / team.

I believe this will be the result of inevitable merging or interobility of all SIP based communications and the merging of social networking and collaboration applications.

thoughts?

[anogalada]

Hmm maybe yor right, I wish more developments for SES technology at the time being Avaya Team still busy boosting up SME products and Nortel.

[djuris]

Your message summarizes the possibilities nicely. Smart phones are attracting this functionality quickly for early adopters, but I find that in our business some clients are still stuck in 1980's technology just for telephony. I doubt Avaya will lead the way with SIP apps any more aggressively than it did with VOIP. I expect innovators like Google's Android to impel the cutting edge advances in wireless, ubiquitous, SIP, consumer apps. Avaya will position itself for enterprises conservatively.

If you subscribe to Current Analysis, permit me to recommend that you read the most recent report on this subject, which I abstracted below.


Market Advisory Report:Impact of Social Networking on Enterprise CommunicationsReport Date:July 02, 2010Analyst:Riggs, BrianMarket:Contact Center Solutions , Enterprise Communications


"Social media and social networking tools are playing an increasing role in the way businesses communicate. This takes many well-documented and generally understood forms: employees leveraging Twitter, Yammer or other publicly available microblogging tools for conversations that might be business-related, personal or a combination of both; corporations establishing a Facebook presence to interact with business partners, customers and prospects; contact center and marketing personnel monitoring social media to detect and/or resolve customer support problems. Employers have responded to the grass-roots adoption of social media in the workplace by embracing it warmly, banning it completely or something in between. The various ways social media has been adopted in business settings and the various ways businesses are deriving benefits from it have a parallel in the various ways in which developers of business communications solutions are integrating social media with their solution sets. This advisory will detail some of the ways forward-thinking vendors are today integrating social media software into their business communications and contact center platforms. However it is important to note that such integrations remain in their infancy. In several cases integrated solutions are not yet generally available; use cases for them are still being sought; and early adopters have yet to be signed up. The market for such solutions – and the solutions themselves – will change dramatically in coming years as products mature, businesses devise clearer social media strategies and developers guide their enterprise customers in how to best integrate social media and business communications."

[rogerg]

Hmmm, good piece! There's no doubt Twitter and Facebook have changed person to person communications. The next "big" change is video.

I won't go into all the drivers, but as we've seen before with Communication Technology, when all the technical parts advance at the same time as the financial need / desire emerges...revolution. Person to person video is just at the edge of exploding. I know, that's been said for quite some time now... or, everybody said the same thing about VoIP / IPT, right? Well, video's traditional infrastructure was so expensive it never reached critical mass, so there's no huge investment loss or user impact since not many used it. We are all still fighting the legacy PBX battle and will be for some time. Dang things just won't die and management knows it!

Also technically, everything just happens to be coming together at the same time. I like to use the OSI Model as a tool in forecasting these things. If you have an understanding of the OSI model, look at the layers and think about what's new or now relevant in each layer as it pertains to video. When everything from the end-user application / hardware, the app signalling protocol, video codecs, all the way down to the physical network capacity required comes together, whala!

Now, if all the Comm apps support SIP... There can / could be many UCC apps that pull it all together.