UC Interoperability Revisited

Several recent articles, here on UCStrategies.com, on No Jitter and elsewhere, and discussions have raised the continuing issue of Interoperability and UC. It is a multi-faceted and increasingly complex issue. In the "old days," everything we communicated with electronically interoperated readily. True, we were limited to just voice telephony and later email. If you had the telephone number, perhaps including the country and area/region code, or, conversely, the email address, you could communicate with virtually any device so connected. As we now move to UC/IP/Mobile/Video/Social communications, the world has certainly gotten more complex and, with the proliferation of devices, we no longer want to communicate with a device, we want to communicate with an individual - NOW - and more than likely, with multi-media (video, text, desktop-sharing) and maybe social. In fact, interoperability has just been raised, by Cisco, as a request for the European Commission to review its approval of Microsoft's acquisition of Skype.

At the up-coming Enterprise Connect, I will be co-leading, with Russell Bennett, a session to explore the current state of UC Interoperability. It has become an annual session with this up-coming version at least the third or fourth reflection. This time, we have a distinguished panel of vendor representatives ranging from Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, NEC and Polycom, with perhaps another yet to be added.

There are many interoperability issues including:

• Interoperability within an enterprise both across legacy and current systems from multiple vendors and during the migration from existing to new/future systems - including voice, video, email, IM/Presence, etc.
• Interoperability between an enterprise and its customers, suppliers and other partners - again multi-media, legacy and current solutions
• Interoperability with networks provided by network service providers (both traditional PSTN and emerging IP/SIP), both fixed and mobile.
• Interoperability between fixed and mobile devices - either devices provided by an enterprise or, becoming ever more likely, BYOD.
• Interoperability of business processes with the enterprise UC architectures (what we have termed UC-B).

You might ask, "why is Interoperability an issue?" Well, come to our session and become part of the dialogue.