The emergence of communications platforms based on open protocols is causing grief in the telecoms community. A recent article in Computerworld shows how the traditional telecom players are using the old canard of disorder to denigrate innovation and preserve what they see as their exclusive domain. The claim is that Session Initiation Protocol or SIP is becoming too complicated and difficult to implement and are calling for yet another new ITU protocol, unsurprisingly controlled by these same telecoms vendors. This is really quite duplicitous, even by the standards of the telecoms industry, especially considering that it is the telecoms vendors themselves that developed the bloated extensions to SIP that they are complaining about. The Internet Multimedia Subsystem is their attempt to keep applications, services and the means of billing for them in their own network core rather than on an application platform. Guess what: IMS lost. It is too complicated even for its own proponents and developers.

At its core, SIP is quite SIMPLE (sorry for the pun), which is why you get a book called SIP Communications for Dummies (supplied for free by SIP-friendly Avaya), freely download the actual standards from the IETF, and start developing using a number of free tools or commercial platforms, and to just get going. The SIP protocol is much like HTTP. At its base is a simple protocol, one that will evolve over time with extensions that meet real new needs. Tim Berners-Lee didn’t expect eBay, YouTube, Google and FaceBook to run over HTTP, but they do, as do billions of financial transactions and they all run over what is essentially still his original simple invention, HTTP, using open standards. HTTP itself is the agreed-to plumbing, modified and enhanced over time as new applications and requirements emerge. Whether the application is served by IIS or Apache, pulls data from Oracle or SQL Server; whether the application is presented on Firefox, IE, or Safari; whether it is rendered using .NET, PHP, ASP, Ajax or DHTML, all recent complex additions, they are all delivered over HTTP. Version 1.1 is still supported, if your needs are simple (no pun). It works.

Meanwhile you can’t even begin to look at ITU standards unless you’re in a very exclusive club. A print (print!) copy of the ITU.325 standard, like all ITU standards, requires paying a hefty fee with many zeros, and the tools needed to develop and test against it all require tools that have costs with even more zeros. The main reason why applications never prospered on ITU platforms is because nobody could ever do it easily and cheaply even for basic functionality. If you can’t do the basics easily how can anyone do anything useful?

Like HTTP, SIP began as a protocol to be developed and delivered on point platforms. In the mid-90’s there were as many variants of web server platform as there were web clients. Those days are long over, and those days are rapidly ending for SIP, especially in the enterprise.

There is no value in the plumbing and the protocol itself, because that comes with the platform. Open standards allow for true commoditization and costs rapidly drop to zero. Whether you choose Microsoft or Avaya, IBM or Oracle, you are buying into an ecosystem that offers as much richness as .NET, PHP, JAVA or Silverlight offer for the Web. Likewise, because these applications are SIP at their core, there will be interoperability between ecosystems, the only difference being how the application is rendered, and expectations will be the same on the client side regardless of where the application comes from.

Interconnection, interoperability and transparency between application ecosystems are paramount, and like the web, the real business opportunity is to innovate on top of the protocol, not to compete or resist the disruption. There are tremendous commercial opportunities even for the telecoms vendors, if their DNA allowed them to evolve.

Communications becomes about the applications, the platforms and their surrounding ecosystems.

Communications is not about the plumbing and the protocols. Just as HTTP before it, SIP has won.

Michael Slavitch

Lead, Technology Initiatives

I was inspired to write this post by an excellent review of Microsoft’s new Office Communications Server (OCS) by Tom Keating over at TMCNet.

Communications technologies represent a market that’s rapidly expanding and diversifying. Microsoft is a major part of this market shift and is largely focused on collaboration and productivity of knowledge workers (via seamless video conferencing, voice conferencing, instant messaging, rich presence, etc.). There’s some VoIP there, but customers will value OCS insofar as it masks the complexity of communicating across a wide diversity of devices/technologies that users can use to communicate.

In contrast, telephony as a stand-alone silo is dying. PBXs (including soft PBXs that replicate PBX functionality in software) are valued primarily in terms of the reliability of their dial-tone, with some of them providing basic unified messaging and call-flow management capabilities. It’s a product category that’s becoming rapidly commoditized, which typically means ever diminishing margins, except for the strongest, best recognized brands (e.g., HP, IBM and Apple have managed to make it through the commoditization of the desktop computer, but dozens of other companies didn’t).

I just marvel at the white space opportunities that Microsoft is helping to create as the industry lurches towards the integration of business process and business communications. Microsoft is continuing to do what it does best, that is to deliver a platform on top of which its partners can create and add value.

I can’t wait to come to work tomorrow and to keep doing just that.

That’s my .02…Be careful out there!

Martin Suter
President

The announcement of Office Communications Server (OCS) last month produced an impressive flurry of marketing activity around unified communications. Jumping on the bandwagon with announcements on “unified communications” products or a partnership with Microsoft is a group of highly unusual suspects. In order to avoid being tagged as “legacy” PBX vendors, many of these companies are scrambling to connect their telephony silos to the OCS power grid under the guise of unified communications.

Who can blame them? Given that all of these vendors are competing head-to-head with Cisco, it makes sense that they would seek to align with Microsoft, the only other contender for the UC crown. This is further simplified by the fact that working with an ecosystem of partners is a Microsoft core competency and part of its DNA. None of these incumbents is able to generate enough momentum on its own to compete effectively with Cisco, so tucking in behind OCS helps reduce drag for a while. But their tanks are nearly empty and the real race is just getting started.

It’s difficult to imagine that the incumbents agree with Microsoft’s assertion that the PBX is dead or with Microsoft’s ads proclaiming that communications should be software. In fact, the vast majority of these announcements, white papers and other marketing pieces from legacy vendors are mostly about trying to plug a traditional PBX system into the Microsoft data center, which is the right place for real unified communications. Just consider what the Microsoft platform provides: a ubiquitous platform that emphasizes user-centric and self-service approaches to driving workforce productivity, administration tools like Active Directory, security, reliability and scalability, connection to corporate data through ODBC, a huge network of Solution Providers, and a lot more. Office Communications Server ups that ante even further with instant messaging, enterprise voice capabilities, video conferencing and more. But how many vendors are really capitalizing on the platform or simply paying it lip service?

What these vendors are offering as “unified communications” is really no different from what they’ve offered in the past: a traditional PBX that stands outside of the data center with some basic convergence wrapping.

That’s my $.02. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

Martin Suter
President

PS — Be careful out there.