When Yours Truly originally formulated the article as �Is UC IMS Friendly?� some months ago, I immediately got a response from two people I�ve spoken with quite a bit over the years. The article�s �angle� may have changed over time, but these fellows� comments are still quite pertinent.
�IMS is a good thing, especially for roaming users,� says Jon Doyle (News - Alert), Vice President of Business Development for CommuniGate Systems (www.communigate.com). �In the IP world, on a carrier level, providers needed some kind of standardization to communicate amongst each other. So with IMS, the �M� means Multimedia and thus �other� applications besides IP telephony. Examples can be content, sharing files, or getting access to data services even though I�m on a network that isn�t the one that I subscribe to, because I�m roaming. That�s very important for IP services as they grow, and as people travel from one network to another. It�s a very key thing for usability. And UC is how it�s all presented to the user. UC is sort of the portal into all of the things that IMS can provide.�
Indu Kodukula, Vice President, Product Management at Oracle (News - Alert) (www.oracle.com), told me, �We at Oracle view unified communications as being able to communicate with any user on any device making full use of the context and the capabilities of the device, and really being able to tie all of that together in a meaningful user experience. And when you think about it that way, it turns out that, first and foremost, the most important capability that makes UC possible is really presence. This is presence that�s assembled and aggregated from many different sources. And it�s about being able to publish that presence information either on demand or as the presence information changes. Furthermore, what really makes presence possible today in a much more standards-based manner than even three or four years ago, is the availability of SIP [Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert)]. Before SIP came about, you didn�t really have a standards-based model for getting presence information from or sending presence information out to all of the producers and consumers. SIP has made that possible.�
�To the degree that IMS makes use of SIP as a control protocol, we absolutely believe that IMS is friendly towards unified communications. And that�s how I would summarize our philosophy in this area,� says Kodukula.
As you can see, UC has lots of friends. Technologies that complement and bolster it, and hapless users such as ourselves who benefit by its mysterious workings...
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