IIT Real Time Communications Conference - The UC Track
I had the opportunity to present and participate in the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Real Time Communications Conference last week, and I can’t recall the last time I was surrounded by so many brilliant people. Representing both academia and the vendor/service provider community, the caliber of participants was mind boggling. The highlights were Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University and Martin (Marty) Cooper of Dyna LLC. Cooper is a former Motorola vice president and division manager who led the team that developed the handheld mobile phone and is credited with making the world’s first cell phone call. Discussions ranged from the technical to the esoteric.
I participated in the Unified Communications track (of course), with my colleague Marty Parker, as well as representatives from NEC, Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, CommuniTech, InfoReach, and MAC Source, and was chaired by Dennis Goodhart. Much of the focus was on the evolution of UC based on drivers such as the new millennials in the work place, the rise of social media, the growing mobile workforce, the influx of personal mobile devices, etc. Almost every presenter talked about the BYOD movement, and the importance of supporting the devices that workers are using to do their jobs. The presentations were more about collaboration and social media than about unified communications, as most of us emphasized the changes that the UC market is currently going through.
I can’t review each presentation, but here are a couple highlights:
- Todd Landry of NEC discussed the need for organizations to focus on how well UC and social software aligns with their enterprise strategy, including their web and security strategy). He pointed out that different groups have different technology demands; users want to be able to sign on from anywhere, use their own devices, and be in control; while the C-level wants to lower costs, increase productivity, increase revenue, secure information, and support their company’s green initiative; and the IT staff wants the technology to align with their strategy, fit into their architecture, enable responsiveness, be cloud- and VM-ready, and be cost effective. Todd noted that NEC is utilizing the Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, which brings the richness of local applications on the PC with the flexibility of browser capabilities. Much of the discussion prior to the UC track was around WebRTC, which seems to be the future replacement for RIA.
- Avaya’s Jane Montemayor stated that Avaya sees the business value increasing as we move from voice to UC to Business Collaboration, noting that collaboration provides more flexibility than UC. Jane defined Business Collaboration as the intersection of context, content, and communications. Along similar lines, I had earlier presented a venn diagram of what I call “Collaborative Communications,” which is the intersection of UC, social media, and collaboration (which includes tools such as conferencing, shared workspaces, document repositories, etc.). Jane stated that by making the end user (rather than the back end) the focus of collaboration, there’s a better chance of people using these tools.
- Marty Parker discussed nine new elements that are changing the way we communicate, including: presence, IP networks/multimedia, mobile devices, IM & chat, enhanced conferencing (context aware able to co-edit, tag, record & archive), collaborative workspaces, social networks, software-based solutions, and embedded communications. He also described several use cases and case studies of UC and the value that organizations are receiving, as well as the various implementation and deployment options for UC. As Marty Parker summarized, changes in communications solutions are: visible, compelling, and disruptive, which means that: this is a risky time, choices must be made, and future leadership is available for the taking.
It was interesting that while this was the unified communications track, UC was seen as a starting point for some of the new real time communications capabilities, notably collaboration and social media. I was glad to see much of the emphasis, in both the UC track and general sessions, on the user experience. Even though this was a pretty technical audience and conference, the role of the user experience was mentioned repeatedly. There were several sessions on WebRTC, which I expect will have a huge impact on the UC world, making it easier to embed things like click-to-communicate in web pages, and go even farther in making new capabilities more accessible. As Serge Lachapelle of Google and the WebRTC organization noted, “The goal of WebRTC is to open the web up to things we never thought of before. Not to bring a phone or IM video chat into the browser, but to enable things we haven’t thought of, and to leverage the strength of the web.” This sounds very exciting and bodes well for the future of unified communications.