On the Strategic Purpose of Open Source

Polycom, Inc. is a leader in telepresence, video, and voice solutions. The company’s solutions enable and empower people to connect and collaborate everywhere. Polycom delivers end-to-end, rich media collaborative applications for voice, video, data and the Web from desktop and mobile personal systems to room systems to the network core.

 

Polycom is also a driving force behind adding high-definition quality to its product line via HD Voice and HD Video — all a part of the company’s next generation collaboration architecture UltimateHD.

 

Chalan Aras is vice president of marketing, Voice Communications Solutions at Polycom. Aras will deliver a presentation entitled The Strategic Purpose of Open Source at the upcoming Astricon that takes place in Glendale, AZ September 22–25.

 

According to Aras, users of open source view the community's flexibility as a strategic advantage with immeasurable opportunities. This session will discuss how the open source community can maintain this advantage in the new world of convergence.

 

I had the chance to pose several questions to Aras in advance of his participation at Astricon.

 

 

CA (News - Alert): We view open-source-based communications infrastructure primarily as a strategic capability that enables companies to maintain the freedom to integrate the best solutions for their needs as opposed to being dependent on a single vendor for all pieces of their deployment. With Web 2.0 driving for open interfaces, well-defined data formats, and mash-up enablement, we see the open source community as the most capable environment for the convergence of Web 2.0 and communications.

 

 

CA: We are one of the leading supporters of open source communications. We do this by maintaining leadership in communications standards such as SIP and delivering products that incorporate the standards fully. We also encourage innovation in the community by freely licensing our leading voice technologies such as G.722.1 to drive the adoption of new communications paradigms such as HDVoice. In both cases, the open source communications community could not deliver upon their promise of rapid innovation without a broad selection of high-quality devices that compose the “face” of their software. This is all to drive greater benefits to the end user community.

 

 

CA: This depends on the scale of the organization. For small organizations, the decision makers are likely seeking something that does not require much customization but yet benefits from the innovations in open source. For larger organizations, the flexibility of open source solutions actually encourages the rapid integration of communications into business processes. So, the organizations need to assess the overall business needs and not simply replace their PBX (News - Alert). They may review options to define a holistic communications enabled business strategy around open source. Essentially this is similar to the migration to Linux and open source Web tools. It was not just an OS transition but a consideration for how business is conducted. Ultimately, many businesses found Linux to deliver significant value, not just a cost savings.

 

 

CA: From our vantage point as a leading communications device supplier and with significant increase in the adoption of new user scenarios from our video products, we believe that the biggest value in Asterisk-based solutions is the broad flexibility they offer and the ability to join a large community of users who are constantly exploring how to tailor the open source environment to their needs. This makes the community extremely vibrant and versatile. This is the same as the Linux community where the efficiency and scale of open source remain ahead of other solutions.

 

 

CA: What we would like to see is for the community to view themselves as more of a communications rather than telephony community. The nuance here is that there are many modes of communication but telephony is mainly a voice phenomenon. Video, presence, IM, directory services, application integration… All of this is at times described as Unified Communications (News - Alert). The open source community enables much if not all of these. Driving further integration of these will be a good trend to see.