Everyone believes 2008 will be a watershed year for unified communications (UC) platform adoption among enterprises. We’ve certainly heard this before–every year, in fact, and in every nook and cranny of the IP communications industry. Siemens (www.siemens.com) recently put forward a series of predictions on the ways in which UC would gravitate into enterprise operations in 2008. Again, many of the same old tunes–Did you hear the one about added productivity through seamless communications?–but in that top ten list, there was an interesting theme.

Many of these assumed benefits of UC are enabled by the inclusion of presence technology as a tool for sewing mobile devices more tightly to the fabric of the workplace, for instance, or integrating the way in which people collaborate between different offices by allowing for current status displays that prevent a lot of tracking down of co-workers. “Multimodal” is a word that appears more than once on the list (I’ll try to keep its usage down to a single instance in this article, if I can).

“Unified communications has presence and the ability to use messaging to send rich, semantic data as a core driver” in both enterprise and “intelligent” residential offerings, according to Joe Hildebrand, Chief Technology Officer for Jabber, Inc. (www.jab ber.com). “You can use if for workflow management; you can use it to set your thermostat at home.” And in newer, converged applications, it is clear that infusing a sense of presence will be the enabler that compels end users to adopt. “Interactive video, for instance, will be very hot in the next two to three years, as compression gets better and the devices get cheaper,” says Ali Kafel, Vice President, Telecom Sales at Stratus Technologies (www.stratus.com), but he cautions that adoption will only really pick up when end users see the benefit of providing other users with their current status, or at least an ability to manage their status. “Opting in will be important to create a bridge between voice-only and multimedia services,” he says, observing that a called party won’t want every call to be a video call (“What if I’m at home in my pajamas?”), but the ability to communicate that presence before that call is taken will help create a seamless call environment.

Yet, if the enthusiasm of UC industry participants is beginning to make IM and presence seems inevitable, it is still in contrast to end-user sentiment, which is still less than enthusiastic, for a number of reasons.

The first is a lingering notion that IM usage is dangerous for a firm’s IT environment, or at least a distracting use of computing resources. FaceTime Communications (www.facetime. com), an instant messaging solutions provider, has been recently active in putting forward its notion of “safe and productive” use of IM in enterprise environments. It recently connected the dots between UC and security with the announcement of an Internet gateway appliance that it has branded Unified Security Gateway (USC).

FaceTime is specifically targeting the opportunity created by the number of organizations that have employees using both proprietary message systems built with enterprise-class IM platforms (Microsoft OCS or IBM Lotus Sametime) and consumer IM applications like Yahoo! and MSN. And, wouldn’t you know it, most companies do use both, according to the company’s own research into what it calls the “Greynets”–real-time P2P communications environments that are beyond the control of IT managers. It is thus pitching UCS as a hygiene-and-archiving engine that unifies both enterprise and freeware platforms and helps firms manage messaging from a single control point.

There are also hurdles in the sheer un-IP-ness of the average enterprise network. The ability of IM/presence to be an UC enabler is wrapped up in its ability to create an interface between the multiple modes of communications that the average end user toggles between every day. And the fact of the matter is that most of the underlying communications platforms–PBXs, mobile services–are not running off of IP. “Today, we are building interfaces which can work with existing PBX call-management capability,” says David Hattey, CEO of FirstHand Technologies, (www.firsthandtech. com), which develops UC applications for smartphones.

Again, one of the complicating factors is the lack of interoperability. While the more business-y mobile devices are working around to it, the fact that new (and possibly most IM/presencefriendly) entrant Apple is still resistant to third-party applications casts doubts on the question of “whether the iPhone will play business.” It must be noted here that Hattey told me this a week or so before Avaya announced an iPhone-specific version of its one-X Mobile client, becoming–for the moment–the IP-PBX player with the largest UC capability over the entire business mobile operating platform spectrum: one-X operates with RIM, Java, and Palm.

That said, there is a larger truth in Hattey’s statement–that the UC industry still hasn’t worked out all its interoperability issues. And this underscores another, more pragmatic reason that enterprise end-user resistance holds back UC adoption. Presence and instant messaging still exist in either balkanized, enterprise proprietary worlds, or in service-providerspecific silos, and neither enterprise nor commercial IM platforms are running very fast toward interoperability. “There are 100,000 XMPP servers out there,” says Jabber’s Hildebrand, referring to the server-to-server protocol that Jabber is built on, but most messaging and presence applications are not, and one won’t be able to communicate with many of the others. “How do we get people using them to see federation is a good idea?” Some are heeding the word, but largely on the consumer side. Apple’s embedded IM client, iChat now accommodates communications with Jabber and other XMPP servers, including Google’s Gtalk. Jabber itself is looking to make its own messaging applications more UCfriendly (and thus more attractive to enterprises), by “putting more SIP hooks” into its XMPP offers, but it isn’t keen to spark a standards war.

Unfortunately, many participants on the field today do see it as a battle for dominance, and Hildebrand doesn’t see this as productive. “I don’t see a scenario where one platform becomes the de facto presence engine” for the UC industry, where, for instance, other players “gang up” on the emerging giant on the field, Microsoft’s OCS, which, 18 months after it launched its UC roadmap based on a presence-based solution, is still far from an established presence (pun intended) in the market. But neither is anyone else; there are too many other powerful players to make this a walkover by anybody. “What’s Cisco going to do?” Hilderbrand asks, only semi-rhetorically. “It is looking to offer a clearly differentiated approach as well.”

Yet while every player seems intent on leaving its own indelible stamp on the presence industry, there are signs that, overall, the industry is beginning to see some value in having those stamps accepted by each other’s postal systems. IBM recently announced that it will integrate its WebSphere application server with Nortel’s business communication SOA application core, which is built around click-to-connect principles, and will also integrate with the Sametime messaging platform. Mitel, which has been orbiting around the Microsoft OCS world for some time now, also recently announced its intention to build solutions based on its platform. Many of these cooperative arrangements, interestingly, seem geared toward specific vertical communities. Both the Mitel/Microsoft and the IBM/Nortel collaborations have been cited as being developed around the healthcare and retail sectors, for instance. However, vertical applications aren’t always in the collaboration cards. Microsoft acquired the financial services-oriented enterprise group chat provider Parlano in October, only to sell the intellectual property rights for its banking-oriented MindAlign 6 to the Bangalore-based outsourcing firm Aditi Technologies.

Added to increased cooperation between similarly presenceminded players is the increasingly open-solutions mindset under which enterprise IT environments are growing. Hildebrand is confident that because of this, end-user adoption of presence- enabled UC is inevitable. “You wouldn’t build your own application server from scratch today, nor your own data center. We want to build the presence platforms” that an interoperable IT market depends upon. He sees particular light at the end of the tunnel in the hosted IP services space. “There are a growing number of providers saying, ‘We have to message-enable this service, and we need applications’” built around the capability presence delivers.

Ultimately, the benefits of UC will be realized, Hattey believes, by a class of enterprises that see that it will in fact “be a revolution to business processes…. It will be like fire,” he says, but his analogy isn’t about the speed of UC adoption, but rather the eyeopening impact fire’s discovery had at the dawn of time. “Once we learned how to cook a chicken we willingly ate raw, we started to ask ourselves what else we could do with this thing.” V

Ross O’Brien, our Asia/Pacific Editor, is a long-time telecom analyst, consultant, writer, and speaker who regularly appears on CNBC and CNN. He is headquartered in Hong Kong. You can reach him at robrien@vonmag.com.