Manned missions to Jupiter are sadly still exist the realm of science fiction. Computing technology however, most certainly is not. IT has progressed at a blinding pace since the mid-1980s, largely based on the accurate prophecy of Moore�s Law coupled with the ubiquity of the Intel (News - Alert) platform. Computing power has doubled on average every two years: A modern computer is 500,000 times as powerful as the state-of-the-art computer of 1984, while costing less in nominal dollar terms. Such abundance has created a technological explosion: Rich software ecosystems have grown on common computing platforms while complex tasks once requiring dedicated hardware are now far more effectively performed as software on generic hardware platforms.
While the computers used in 2010 look laughably archaic today, the phone that sits at Roy�s office desk sadly doesn�t. Business telephony systems largely look, act, and feel like some monolithic relic � throwbacks to the days of mainframe computers and dedicated hardware. To the PBX (News - Alert) incumbents, it is as if the last 25 years haven�t happened, and we are still using electric typewriters or dedicated word processors.
Unified communications is meant to change all that. UC is about transformational change that brings business telephony out of an age of separate unchanging monoliths and into the rapidly evolving and interconnected IT data center. Signal processing, when done in software, means that a move to wideband audio requires a software update, not a forklift upgrade. Business telephony, as part of a larger ecosystem, means that business applications are no longer considered aliens from another planet. This is not surprising for anybody that has been following industry trends: what has been surprising is how little effort the industry has made to accommodate the elephant that has taken up residence in the server room, that elephant being of course Microsoft.
Windows dominates in the IT data center. According to the Yankee group, over 80% of enterprise servers use Microsoft® Windows® Server. Businesses use the Windows platform because it has the lion�s share of commercial applications in the area of personal collaboration and productivity. Microsoft is well poised to become the dominant influence regarding the development of applications and services for the enterprise voice market, just as it has become the dominant influence for applications and services that run on servers and workstations.
However, if one scans across the incumbent business communications vendors, the impression one gets is that Microsoft datacenters don�t exist, that Active Directory® is irrelevant, that Windows is a desktop operating system at best, and integrations are done through shell scripting and a command line interface. These vendors are happy to supply you with any software you want, as long as it�s running on Linux and on its own little telephony island. In a world where 80% of enterprise servers run Windows, this is absurd. Oracle and SAP (News - Alert) are committed to the Windows platform, so why not Cisco and Avaya?
Part of the reason may be that the incumbents do not wish to acknowledge the legitimacy of Windows as a communications platform. That is a stretch: Cisco�s own CallManager shipped for years purely as a Windows 2000-based appliance, with a Linux port appearing only recently. Avaya, a recent convert to the software world, can hardly make claims about legitimacy.
Dig a little deeper and you�ll notice that the real fight is largely about building competing ecosystems based on Linux rather than Windows. IBM (News - Alert), with decades of experience in Unix-based systems, leads in that regard in the Linux world. IBM can hardly be called a vendor of free software. While companies such as RedHat and Novell (News - Alert) do provide commercial editions of Linux, along with a few commercialized open source applications to go along with them, none of them can even begin to match the commercial Linux ecosystem of the granddaddy of them all.
Given that, the focus on Linux at the expense of Windows may well turn out to be a fatal mistake for incumbent vendors. An artificial barrier between such latecomers and 80% of today�s IT datacenters is bad enough. Competing with a well-established IBM for the remaining 20% is quite another thing entirely.
Martin Suter is President of Objectworld Communications Corp. (www.objectworld.com)www.objectworld.com.
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