Unified Communications Expert: 2.0 Technologies Will Prove Plato Wrong

ITEXPO (News - Alert), Los Angeles – This just in: Plato had it backwards. According to one IT expert, that is.

 

During a keynote address at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo today, the director of unified communications infrastructure for a Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based company said that the Greek philosopher who learned from Socrates and taught Aristotle made an insightful distinction in his so-called “Parable of the Cave.”

 

The parable, immortalized in Book Seven of the “Republic,” the major work in Plato’s considerable cannon, is an elaborate analogy that forms the underlying principles of the great philosopher’s epistemology.

 

To summarize: Imagine prisoners who have been chained into place for their entire lives inside a dark cave whose only light is a large fire, in front of which people pass carrying puppets and other objects.

 

The prisoners come to identify the shadows of the objects, cast on a wall in front of them, as the “real” people, dogs, trees and other objects that “really” exist. But if a prisoner were set free from his chains and turned around, then, once he could walk outside, after his eyes adjusted to the sun, he would realize how foolish he had been. The tangible objects he now encounters have more reality than the shadows on the cave’s wall.

 

Yet, in a sense, according to Lawrence Byrd of Avaya (News - Alert) Inc., a company that specializes in business communications, those objects that the prisoners saw on the wall represent the future of telecommunications, which simulates presence with technologies such as video conferencing in order to help enterprises save money and communicate more effectively.

 

“The whole concept of 2.0 was invented in 380 B (News - Alert).C. by Plato,” Byrd told IT insiders and others gathered in a conference room at the Los Angeles Convention Center for his ITEXPO address, titled “Unified Communications (News - Alert) in a 2.0 World.”

 

“Plato was kind of a 1.0 guy, so he believed that people could turn around and look at true reality,” Byrd said. “But we know that it’s turning away from that, to the flickering images on the screen, is what we really should be doing. The 2.0 world is this virtual creation.”

 

The notion dovetails nicely with comments made at another Avaya-led event, last night’s conference-opening workshop about UC, at which company officials hailed their online developer community, DevConnect (News - Alert).

 

At the workshop, Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research for Yankee Group, delivered a keynote presentation titled “The Role of Communication in the Anywhere” – a talk that centered on the hot topic of “Unified Communications” – technologies that 70 percent of SMBs are using or are planning to use, according to one recent study.

 

UC is also something that Avaya officials say they’re focusing their SMB sales and services upon – witness the hiring recently of Raj Sonty as vice president of solutions at its SMB division, an appointment about which he spoke to TMCnet.

 

According to Kerravala, in the UC Web market today, VoIP is maturing as most organizations see UC as a means of saving money, a sort of new wave phenomenon that many industry insiders have recognized for years as “converged” or “integrated” messaging.

 

For Kerravala, the future of UC is “intelligent communications.”

 

“Communications embedded into the fabric of business,” Kerravala said, defining the term. “Communications embedded into business applications. Intelligent communications creates business agility, process improvement and leads to competitive advantages.”

  

According to Kerravala, the so-called “communications-enabled revolution” will be as big as the client server revolution, allowing any communications tool to serve any user, in any place.

 

“The future value will come from the third-party applications that run on top of the communications platforms,” he said.

 

The executive said he believes that voice-enabled applications, in particular, will create a much higher level of business productivity.

 

Alas, in his “Republic,” a watershed work for western thought whose principles were contradicted by Aristotle – the tension between the two schools of thought created the range of philosophical debate until Immanuel Kant nearly two millennia later – Plato also addressed sound. According to Plato, the ignorant prisoners in the cave mistook the echoes of what they heard bouncing off of the cave’s walls from outside as “real” sound.

 

Yet for Byrd, Plato also likely got that part wrong.

 

“Plato was a genius, he just got it 180 degrees backwards,” Byrd said.