10 Technologies for 2011 : 5. Unified Communications

Unified Communications


On your way to work you first check your corporate email, then your cell phone's voice messages, then perhaps your personal email. When you get to your office you now proceed to check your corporate voice messages, then scan any incoming fax messages, before signing into your instant messaging service. Thats six different sources of information for you and six different ways people may try to contact you. Every now and then you forget about one of these channels only to discover to your horror that a critical message private or corporate from your boss or important business contact got lost between requests from social networks and your spouse trying to reach you in the middle of a busy day.

It does not have to be this way!  email, fax, voice, offline instant messages can all be delivered into one universal inbox and retrieved from anywhere with Unified Communications. This rapidly developing area of technology seeks to transcode all of these kinds of messages into one digital form. So you can get your corporate voicemail in your email, transcoded into some form like MP3 or WAV files that can be played back on most smartphones.
Incoming fax can be converted to a PDF file and attached and sent to your email client. Extending this further out you could be using a video client on your desktop, cell phone or conference room, or using a corporate instant messaging platform to create a on the fly audio conference.

Besides the advantage of having one unified inbox, Unified Communications also creates powerful presence capabilities. Since the servers that house your universal inbox has so many different channels feeding into it, it knows which channels you are active on at any given time, so it can notify any sender of the best channel for reaching you. Even better you can specify which channels make the most sense for you at any time. Perhaps when you drive you do not like to get instant message notifications. Perhaps you rather people send you email when you are in a meeting rather than call you.

Once again CISCO and Microsoft are frenemies in the corporate Unified Communications space. They have a good interoperability story (because they have to, given each company has a strong installed base). However each one is approaching it from different directions. CISCO from a hardware vantage point(its core and edge routers are everywhere) steadily adding software capabilities. Microsoft from the ubiquity of MS Office, MS Sharepoint, MS Outlook and MS Office Communicator (now Lync).

Making Unified Communications happen is not a one quarter activity. It may very well be a multi-year roadmap with clearly articulated goals. Perhaps the first two quarters are dedicated to getting corporate voice mail and email in a single inbox. Future quarters could be dedicated to getting presence extended to instant messaging on all platforms in use etc.

10 Technologies for 2011 : 1. Mobile Devices that blur the line between Smartphones and Computers

As 2011 gets underway in earnest, and the C.E.S. show is behind us, its time to look at 10 technologies that are going to dominate 2011 for CIOs and CTOs.

1. Mobile Devices that blur the line between Smartphones and Computers
    The launch of the iPhone in 2007 changed the world of enterprise computing forever. Although Microsoft and Palm had competed for mind and marketshare for more than a decade with various versions of PocketPC and PalmOS based devices, they never found an audience beyond the heavy power users who treated them as highly specialized PDAs. The iPhone changed all that. With the launch in the full glare of the media propelled by the polished presentations at MacWorld and Apple WDC by none other than Steve Jobs, suddenly the smartphone became "cool" and a status symbol at work.

The launch of the AppStore with support for third party apps made the phone genuinely useful for casual users. The email and calendar sync functions the phone brought with it, drove users to question the need for two devices: One for personal use and another for corporate use (typically a Blackberry). More often than not, the Blackberry and its physical keypad were given up in favor of the iPhone's capacitative buttons, the personal communication device and the business calendaring and email merging together.

Now more than 5 years later, we have seen an accelerating trend: More and more powerful smartphones that are in effect little computers in themselves. The iPad has taken up a niche between a phone and a full fledged laptop and its thriving in its spot. The Motorola ATRIX introduced at CES carries this trend even further: A single Android based device that can be your phone when you travel and when you reach your office, it can be docked and used to drive a full video display with a full keyboard.

This trend of devices that are crossovers exhibiting qualities of both Smartphones and Computers will only accelerate with the arrival of the iPad 2, the RIM Playbook and the various HP Web OS based devices to be announced in Q1 of this year.