Original article Posted in Ovum Comments: Exit IP telephnony and enter Unified Communication
IP telephony is no longer talked as a separate solution rather it has been merged along with other forms of communication and the unified communication is becoming the mantra. Now take an example of a small enterprise.
- It has a PBX for the enterprise attendant and in house extension functionality
- Has taken the mobile connection for its employees who are on move. So it is paying up the bill for these usage which could run into large amount
- It could allow access to the company intranet for which the users will be using the laptop. When the user accesses the company intranet, enterprise needs to make sure that the laptop contains the latest security updates & virus definition. Also it needs to embrace the document management to manage the rights of the documents
- voice mail, fax, e-mail – seemless integration and getting notification of each other
So if you need to address these then you need components like IP PBX (Asterix) + SIP phone (hard as well as soft) +
mobile client (low end as well as high end) that has the presence functionality (developed on top of Android?) & device/application management capability (Funambola) + centralized identity server + groupware along with collaboration tools (Open office?) + database middleware for integrating with ERP (any open source EAI?) + IVR (dialogic cards?) + conferencing server (may be can use SailFin project AS) + other clients on PC or laptop, a desk phone + unified management platform to manage these components including network management, business process flow control, billing/reporting
Now comes the big question, if you get the UC from open source, then how about the professional service as for most of the vendors this is a very good way of charging its customers. Also the vendors claim their products focus on the reliability, availability and security even though the functionality would be the same as open source. Also if there is a new functionality to be developed, you can at least get it developed from the vendor, but if it from open source then the features are driven from the developers and it may not be the same as what you wanted.
So what stops from SI/ISV to partner with MS to offer the service? Would the license cost be deterrent for the enterprises to go for this?
