Abstract
Equipment vendors in the telecoms sector are increasingly talking about
‘unified communications' . For the telecoms vendors the term unified
communications implies an applications set that extends beyond voice into the
collaboration space traditionally occupied by the major desktop software
vendors such as IBM and Microsoft. The term also recognises that
communications can be from a wide range of devices over both fixed and mobile
networks and that, for many end users, the ‘desktop' will increasingly
become a portable mobile device. At the same time, Microsoft is committed to
extending its own collaboration capabilities into key components of the
enterprise voice space traditionally occupied by the telecoms vendors.
The increasing convergence of these two areas is starting to define a new
space - unified collaboration. From a technology perspective this convergence
has been driven by the adoption of IP, and is now being greatly accelerated by
the almost universal support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) by both the
telecoms and collaboration software players.
This report investigates the communication and collaboration offerings from
both the telecoms and software communities. The obvious area of contention is
the grey area between the functions that are clearly part of the typical
software collaboration suite, and those that are becoming extensions of the
telecoms vendors' unified communications offerings. As an increasing number of
vendors in the telecoms sector are already delivering enterprise software for
collaboration, the battleground runs right up to the end user.
Given the dominance of the telecoms community in realtime communication areas
such as voice and video it is unlikely that they will yield their position
easily. Similarly, the software sector owns the desktop and will not give that
up either. The only practical solution is for the two to work together to
offer the best of both worlds in comprehensive unified collaboration solutions.
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