According to Barry O'Sullivan, SVP of the voice technology group at Cisco Systems, the core of UC is the network itself, which the company sees as the unifying force behind the convergence of IP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, contact center applications and other technologies. (This is in-line with my Collaboration Predictions for 2006. So I'm 2 years off...)
"At Cisco, we believe we're entering the second phase of the Internet, which is all about collaboration. And the key underlying technology to collaboration is unified communications," O'Sullivan said during the Web conference.
The opportunity is huge and continuing to grow, he said, the total value of the UC opportunity this year alone is approximately $30B.
Cisco's approach to UC has to do with collaboration and collaboration is all about connecting people, no matter what device, operating system or telephone is used, he said. He stressed the importance standardization.
"Collaboration really demands openness, and that's really a very important part of our strategy. Our vision is all about collaboration -- empowering people to collaborate effectively, anytime, anywhere, from any device," O'Sullivan said.
Cisco is looking at the UC market from the perspective that the network (as a platform) could bring the heterogeneous world together, he said.
In developing UC products and services (the company's focus on services grew with the acquisition of WebEx in May 2007), Cisco is driving its engineers along four key design principles, Burton said.
1. Build UC services as a set of virtualized capabilities.
2. UC systems built on Cisco Services-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) for multiple layers of security to protect against viruses, trojans, malware, and protecting user identities and corporate data.
3. Simple and ease to use.
4. Technology needs to be open.
"We really focus on standards, so we build our UC system on SIP, on XML, on Web services," as well as a plethora of other standards, Burton said.
The end goal is a rich communications experience on any device, he said.
According to O'Sullivan, it's the network that makes that work and really drives a better application experience.
