By Art
Rosenberg, The Unified-View/
UC
Strategies Expert
Since there is
so much news about Lync, WebRTC, and mobile communications in general that has
come out lately, I will make this post short, and hopefully sweet.
Because both
business and personal communications are migrating towards multimodal mobile
devices, online mobile apps, and “cloud” based software infrastructure,
communication service providers (CSPs) and wireless carriers are becoming the
focal point for BYOD application offerings. Legacy hardware-based network
connectivity has always been difficult and expensive to develop and integrate,
but they are now becoming “virtualized” software functions to join business
process applications and data storage by moving into “cloud” services.
My UC
Strategies colleague, Michael Finneran, just posted an article
describing how networking is becoming more flexible and controllable by
applications. By becoming more software-based (Software Defined Networking),
networking functions can now be more flexible and support a variety of end user
needs, including multimodal person-to-person communication applications and
integrations with business process applications (CEBP). This will also
facilitate the service offerings of CSPs to business organizations to
accommodate different vertical market needs of businesses and their
customers/consumers.
This trend was
reflected in a recent announcement by Genband,
but just reinforced by HP’s announcement at the Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona of their Open Networks Functions Virtualization (NFV) offering which
provides all the tools needed by communication service providers to develop,
integrate, test, and support operational network services in a Software Defined
Network (SDN) environment. This will simplify and speed up the network
connectivity required for all modes of contextual communications between people
and online applications.
Since BYOD and
CEBP will increasingly shift business communications to personalized multimodal
devices and services, wireless CSPs are becoming the starting point for end
users who want their latest smartphones and tablets to connect with both legacy
PSTN contacts and IP services. Business communications now include consumers
who interact with many different organizations and online applications, using a
single, multimodal mobile device. That will become the key driver for network
flexibility that Michael discusses in his post.
Whether you
want “UC” to mean “unified communications,” or as Microsoft has proposed at
their Lync 2014 conference, “universal communications,” makes no difference.
Users are just looking for the service that will be flexibly multimodal, can be
used with any device anywhere, and can be used to interact with online mobile
apps in the “clouds.”
For business
applications, including customer services, communications will be flexibly
embedded within online apps (‘click-for-assistance” options) and thereby become
more efficient and “contextual” for both the contact initiator and the
recipient. That is what “UC” is really all about!
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