Signal to Noise

(With apologies to Ken Camp, who might not want such a grumpy cynic agreeing with him!)

Ken Camp is a pioneer in our industry. His name invokes respect and perhaps even envy among his peers, myself included.  The guy wrote one of the very first books about the relevance of IP Telephony in the enterprise, “IP Telephony Demystified”. This book was my first resort when fact-checking my own first VoIP book, “Switching to VoIP”, and a book I still thumb through regularly.   Aside from the book, Ken has been an active and visible proponent of the VoIP technology family through his IP Adventures and Realtime Unified Communications blogs.  Nutshell: he’s a thought leader, and you should listen to him.

Today, he told us that Unified Communications and Web 2.0 are, in effect, the same thing.

This is my attempt to respond to this thoughtful postulation. Earlier in the week, some other people in the blogosphere surmised that business VoIP still hasn’t “happened”, that it never really arrived, and that much of the hype over Unified Communications was exactly that–hype. Here’s what Ken quoted, a passage from Eric Krapf:

A debate has been going on over at No Jitter about whether enterprises are actually adopting Unified Communications [...]. I tend toward the skeptical end of any conversation about how widely a hot new technology is actually being adopted, but I do see a few signs that enterprises are at least paying attention and, where possible, looking for an opportunity to get their feet wet.

Now Eric’s understanding of UC is tainted right in this quote, as he describes it has a “hot new technology”, when, in reality, UC has been past the point of emergence for the last 3 years or so.  The adoption curve, among enterprises, has surpassed the point of majority, somewhere in late 2006 or early 2007.  So UC isn’t exactly hot or new. UC capabilities and infrastructure exist in every Fortune 500(0) company in the U.S.  So the question isn’t whether or not it’s here. The question is: is the infrastructure getting used?

It’s getting used within the enterprise, but not in the massive, global manner that the underpinnings of the technology encourage. I have a few theories as to why this is the case.

I would characterize UC not as a hot new technology, but as an evolving, suppressed, political hot potato that many vendors (i.e. Cisco, Avaya, Nortel) have acknowledgingly hobbled by:

- Reducing the opportunities presented intrinsically in VoIP protocols and apps by forcing them to work in a static outmoded framework of hard phones, voicemail, and decidely “1.0″ telephony feature sets. All the excitement folks had about UC has been boiled back down to the basics because of the limits placed on VoIP by big vendors. They go around (still) saying “SIP isn’t ready for prime time” and “Asterisk isn’t ready for prime time” and “T.38 isn’t ready for prime time” and all this other BS that is a complete buzzkill.  It’s reminiscent of the Microsoft FUD of the early and mid 1990s.

- Capitulating to the phone companies’ legacy infrastructure offerings rather than insisting on an end-to-end IP network, which is what we all envisioned 5 years ago when we were writing VoIP books, when I was so full of vigor and optimism.  Instead, the phone companies still run 80% of their enterprise services the way they always did, on copper-infested last-miles that don’t run Internet Protocol except as a means of routing third-party IP packets out to the Net.  Ask your SMB account rep for  delivery of end-to-end VoIP in a place like Cleveland, OH, and you’re likely to get the deer in the headlights glare. Trust me, I gave up on it.

So, in some ways, I agree that the hype was just hype.  But, sadly, it’s the fault of the equipment vendors. I blame Cisco for not pushing VoIP into the end-to-end arena, because they earn money on VoiP using seat licenses, the vast bulk of which occur on the customer premise, not at the C.O.  So the big revenue opportunity for a Cisco lies in converting the customer side of the demarc into VoIP while leaving the Bell side at large basically unchanged.

Me–I’m a consultant, and in the end, I often tell SMB customers not to bother with VoIP until the interconnect situation changes. When 75% of the country can’t even get SIP trunks, let alone end-to-end IP without spending an arm and a leg on MPLS services, what’s the point of converting the customer premise to VoIP?  So my clients are given the good advice to wait.  One of them has an AltiGen TDM system. It still has click-to-call, heads-up-display, and all that cool stuff you used to only see on VoIP PBX systems, but because Bell has taken too long to IP-ify their local networks, the TDM vendors caught up with the VoIP featureset and pretty much leveled the playing field.

NOTE: If this sounds like “news to you”, it’s because you’re on the west coast of California, where all the phone companies offer good service, and IP is everywhere.  Not so here in the Midwest. Read on.

Now that I’m done ripping the telcos a new one, let’s talk about what Ken is saying (sorry; the phone company stuff always slips out).

Ken makes a salient point when he talks about the third phase of unified communication’s emergence:

This convergence of voice and data networks has continued around the globe for the past several years. Today there are many networks that still haven’t fully converged. The process continues, and for many companies, the end of the road is nowhere in sight.

Note the part where Ken says “for many companies, the end of the road is nowhere in sight.”  These companies Ken refers to, often times (in my opinion) are the telecommunications carriers who seem to exist with one objective in mind: revenue protection as opposed to innovation.  To find out where the end of THAT road goes, take a look at the current Apple/Google/Microsoft dynamic.  The revenue protector is losing and losing big ground, while the innovators are developing NEW revenue, the elusive holy grail of every institutionalized business. (Question: how do we, MegaCorp Inc., attract new revenue? Answer: Offer something NEW, DUH….)

Then, Ken poses this question:

In the Information Week piece, Krapf asks is anyone actually implementing UC? I’d rephrase it differently – Is there anyone who isn’t implementing UC?

I would funnel this question slightly so that it reads, “Is there anyone who isn’t implementing VoIP?”

And the answer is a resounding yes. Plent of folks aren’t using VoIP, because the unique advantages of Voice over IP have evaporated in the vacuum of carrier inaction. The dirty little secret is that UC has evolved in SPITE of voice over IP, not by leveraging its technological advantages.  Sure, there are cousins of the VoIP technology family throught UC and throughout Web 2.0: click-to-call, unified CRM contact center solutions, Grand Central and the like, etc.  But VoIP wasn’t the unanimous cornerstone of UC many of us predicted it to be.

Sure, VoIP has its niches. The customer side of the prem in a greenfield build, for example. Or the “free app service” niche. VoIP is now often thought of as a best-effort glue-in solution for entrepreneurs who want to offer some service for FREE.  FREE and VoIP go together like peas and carrots.  But all these things are peripheral to the practice of UC.  VoIP is always thought of as a solution item or a tactical measure, not an infrastructure item or a strategic investment. Here’s what I mean.

Ask a Microsoft guy what VoIP means and he’ll immediately think of something like, “the method in which an OCS gateway connects Microsoft’s conferencing server to the outside world or trunks calls over to an Avaya TDM switch. Ask an appservice provider what he thinks VoIP means and he’ll think of “the way I deliver service to my customer without them having to pay the local Bell.”  Ask a Cisco PBX guy what he thinks VoIP means and he’ll tell you something like, “it’s the way IP phones communicate with the CallManager.”

Sure, all these things are true, but an awareness of the greater point of VoIP is missing from the equation. Roll back to 2004, when I was working on the first book.  Here was a protocol family that could handle ALL modes and legs of telecommunication, from the customer prem to the switching infrastructure to the long distance to the automation. 100% IP. 100% software. Yet the phone companies would rather complain about the “newness” of the SIP RFC than slap a $300 gateway card into their local CO to handle a customer’s need to do SIP trunking.  That KILLED VoIP as a strategic factor on the global network. I’ll give you an example. A 500-line call center like TeleTech in Amherst, OH, isn’t going to benefit from end-to-end VoIP because the cruddy local telco and other like it around the country make true end-to-end convergence impossible.  Why invest in the infrastructure when the telcos won’t unlock the doors that make VoIP work end-to-end?  Imagine the advantages of an all IP global telecom network from layer 3 on up!!

So the ubiquity of VoIP never happened.  The ubiquity of UC, on the other hand happened and happened HUGE. And this is what I understand Ken’s main point to be:

Without unified communications, you have no social media – no Facebook, no Twitter, no comprehensive integration. Without unified communications, the web as we know it is a pipe dream. It had email and static web pages.

The emergence of good frameworks for telecom to web interaction has enabled an incredible convergence of (non-VoIP) personal devices and web sites, and this has happened AMAZINGLY fast.  Faster than I would’ve thought. And it’s all IP-based, for the most part. Even service delivery over cellular data networks has gone the way of IP, years ahead of the copper carriers.  This, combined with the creativity and hippy mentality of the web, has resulted in an incredible combustion of business energy and social connectedness.

Then, Ken hits a home run with this passage:

Web 2.0, the phrase we’ve all heard a million times is unified communications. Without UC, there could have been no Web 2.0. Unified communications, like VoIP, isn’t a product you write a check for and buy. It’s not a single product you implement and move on. It’s not as complex as vendors make it sound.

By saying that UC and Web 2.0 are the same thing, what Ken suggests is that UC isn’t confined to the enterprise as popular opinion would state.  When you log on to MySpace from your iPhone, you’re UCing. When you receive SMS directions from Google Maps, you’re UCing. When you geotag, you’re UCing. When your blog post is picked up by Google News through RSS, you’re UCing.  Koom-bah-yah already.

I also like how Ken wrote that VoIP isn’t a product you write a check for and buy. Ken is too smart to let the marketeers redefine the “there’s nothing I can’t do” nature of VoIP for their own vertical purposes.  VoIP is a technology family that has yet to come into its own, due largely to the big carriers’ refusal to embrace it, even as they sit on panels at VONs and ITExpos and extol its coming of age.

Think about what Ken said about the explosion of UC through Web 2.0. Now, imagine the whole global telecom service palette, public and private, end-to-end, was IP-based. Imagine what THAT would do for UC.

Make sure you listen to Ken’s Stardust Radio episode on the 21st at 9pm EST.  He and many of us will be tossing these ideas around.  Gosh I feel like a VoIP zealot.  VoIP is dead. Long live VoIP. Etc.

Note: The Talkshoe site was down so I didn’t give a link to Stardust Radio. Check Ken’s page for the deets.