Another key aspect is the integration of those communication modes into the applications that people use every day. We can think of this as integrated communications (IC). This takes one of two forms:

1. Building the communication mode directly into the application. For example, a wiki could include built-in whiteboarding functionality or a salesforce automation tool could include built-in text chat functionality.

2. Enabling users to trigger the communication mode from the application. For example, a billing application could include a “click-to-talk” feature or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application could enable users to join a real-time chatroom.

Ideally these communication modes result in a real-time interaction: whiteboarding, collaborative editing, voice or video conferencing, one-to-one or multi-party text chat, etc. As a recent Gartner report notes, “The largest single value of UC is its ability to reduce ‘human latency’ in business processes.” Store-and-forward communication modes such as fax, voicemail, and even email are increasingly perceived as second-best, because compared to their real-time brethren they don’t help to reduce latency. But to know if a low-latency interaction is possible, you need presence. Basic presence simply tells you if another party is connected to the network. More advanced presence includes data about another party’s location, mood, current activity, device capabilities, and other relevant (and, sometimes, irrelevant) information.

Presence is the glue that will enable companies to build on the UC revolution by launching real-time communication modes from any application. We have already seen this trend in single-vendor application stacks, where little presence icons beckon the user to, for example, chat with document co-authors. But such a silo approach is only the beginning, because many applications are not part of a single vendor’s application stack. For example, many enterprises and service providers write their own specialpurpose applications, use off-the-shelf software from a wide variety of vendors, or turn to open-source software or Internet services for cutting-edge functionality such as blogging, wikis, and social networking.

So if you want to gain competitive advantage, often it’s not good enough to wait for even a preferred vendor to integrate UC capabilities into their full application stack. You need presence, and you need it now.

Helping to make solutions possible is the existence of open standards for presence information. Both the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and the SIMPLE extensions to SIP enable a wide variety of devices to publish basic network availability, rich presence, and device capabilities information. Indeed, support for these protocols is reaching the point of ubiquity, from traditional personal computers to mobile handsets, gaming consoles, PDAs, and beyond.

Where does this information go? Typically it’s published to a presence engine managed by your enterprise IT team or a service provider. More and more of these presence engines are comfortable in a multi-protocol world and can accept presence and capabilities information published in a variety of formats.

The next challenge is for your developers or a third-party software company to embed that presence and capabilities data in an application. Sometimes that happens via the very same protocols used to generate the information in the first place, and sometimes it happens via an API. Either way, presence is only as good as the tools for distributing and accessing it, so here is where your choice of a presence engine can make the difference between competitive advantage and competitive disaster.

If you think that’s hyperbole, think again. In today’s fast-paced world, reducing human latency is a key factor in both improving business productivity and increasing customer stickiness. If you don’t do it, your competitors will — and they will reap the benefits.

Dave Uhlir is Vice President of Products and Services at Jabber,
Inc. (www.jabber.com).

Unified Communications Communications Magazine Table of Contents