Very important post from the Chief Technology Officer
newweb.cistera.com
Thursday March 9, 2006
VoiceCon Virtually
The big announcement this week from Voicecon was the announcement that Cisco as added the word “unified” to its PBX products and they “they have done a UTurn” on supporting SIP. Of course I can now revel that we had know about these things for a while and we have been working on the interoperability with our products and the new Call Manager 5.
Call Manager 5 is the latest iteration in the Call Manager platform but it is a significant rewrite of the product to support Linux, or more Correctly Cisco Enterprise Linux. The big changes are the change in the platform and the database (DB2) that they are using and the change to support SIP end points natively. Funny enough we made the argument over 4 years ago that in order to scale into 100,000 plus phones, we need a more scalable and controllable embedded OS and a database that can realistically support many devices over a wide area and many thousands of devices. They have come to the same conclusion that we made and that the architecture is very similar to our own convergence platform.
SIP was a natural progression for Call Manager, they have support SIP trunking since Call Manager 4.0, but I do take issue that it is a UTurn. Cisco had always made it clear that they would support it when the standards allow it.
You can read the gossip about Cisco and SIP here.
The gossip probably has an element of true to it but I personally knew about this decision in December 2004, so the timing is a bit out but nonetheless it is welcome news and will make interoperability easier and reduce (eventually) the number of protocols we need to support.
The new SIP based Soft Client looks very interesting. I have not had time to look at it but it looks to me like the Xten Ibeam, a very nice Video/Voice client, and is a logical product extension that we can extend on. More reading here. As soon as we can get it set up on our production system I will let you know about it.
The most interesting speech was given by Avaya CEO Don Peterson who stated that the businesses should not be looking to VOIP to reduce communications costs, but should be looking at VOIP to improve processes. Thank God, someone is saying this beside ourselves, (some one important too).
Computerworld Article
Now maybe the discussion can move to dealing with the real benefits and that is finding ways to improve business processes and collaboration instead of making the dubious argument that it saves raw dollars in the communication budget. This argument will only take you so far until everyone can claim that benefit. The market should now shift to who best can serve the interests of the user and the business.
Voicecon has been good this year for us from all accounts I have received. We have been especially lucky with a strong range of products to show and the increased visibility from our partners Comstor and ATT. We continue to make good progress on the convergence platform argument and more and more people are understanding the value proposition of the Cistera Convergence Server. Next week is the Cisco Partner Summit.
Posted by GregR at 07:48 AM. Filed under: General |
