Much of the buzz this week has been about what Microsoft (News - Alert) is doing in the unified communications space, and that might well be justified. After all, they are quite a big player, and if they set their sights on a market like enterprise communications, people had better take notice.

 

But as big and popular as they are Microsoft has never been the only game in town. Increasingly enterprises are turning to solutions offered by purveyors of open source, such as Fonality (News - Alert).

 

I had the opportunity to nail down some time with Chris Lyman, CEO and CTO of Fonality about unified communications and what the future of that marketplace might look like in the future.

 

CL: Unified Communications is the concept of creating efficiency cycles by unifying some, or all, of the many disparate forms of digital communication in the workplace. Why the urgency? Well, the modern employee has nine ways of being reached: e-mail, phone on desk, voicemail on desk, cell phone, voicemail on cell phone, home phone, voicemail on home phone, text message, and instant message (chat). It is complete mayhem, and while mayhem in your personal life may be entertaining, in the workplace we call this “inefficiency.” Inefficiency means lost time, which quickly translates to lost dollars.

 

 

CL: The market opportunity is massive. Examined at its ultimate, it is the revenue superset of each of the individual players in the communication industry: e-mail, instant message, mobile market, and PBX. The end-user doesn’t care *who* they get their communication services from. Just as long as they:

 

 

So, one big way to make them “simple” is to unify them! One example is RIMM. They made a fortune with their BlackBerry (News - Alert), by unifying e-mail and mobile.

 

 

CL: We’ve got HUD. HUD is a Fonality application which resides on the Windows or MAC desktop and pulls together all the different types of corporate communication into one interface. With one click of a mouse an employee can contact any other employee via desk phone, home phone, mobile phone, softphone, email, voicemail, or instant message (chat). They can also see “presence,” which means they will know who is talking to who, be able to record calls, or even barge them. HUD also integrates with Outlook so that your computer screen tells you the actual name of who is calling you, before you pick up the phone.

 

 

CL: Nobody is asking for unified communications as a holistic buzzword, but they all want it as a concept in some form or another. They ask for “Outlook Integration” because it just makes sense that they should be able to click on an email and call the person who sent the email. HUD makes this possible. They ask for “find me follow me” (a way of making phone calls track you down at home or on your mobile and end up in the right voicemail box). So, in summation, people want to bring order to the chaos even if they don’t know exactly what to ask for just yet.

 

 

CL: Everyone always wants their lives to be simpler. So, 100% of the market wants UC in some form or another already right now. Again they don’t call it “UC”. That’s a buzzword. They call it a million different things ranging from CRM integration, Outlook integration, LDAP support, and more.

 

 

CL: Yes they are. However, open source is built on open standards and the use of open standards induces cost-effective unification and even federation. So, while the two items are mutually exclusive, one does ‘wag the other’s tail.’

 

 

CL: Sure. trixbox is a great start. It’s the world’s largest Open Source telephony system. Zimbra and SugarCRM are great starts as well. But, true unified communications is bigger than any one project. Therefore, a multitude of open projects will germinate open standards and therefore induce unification.

 

 

CL: At the desktop level we are already integrated: Fonality integrated with Outlook in 2004, which was quite early in our space. When there is an inbound call, the name of the caller (based on the caller-ID as found in Outlook) pops onto the screen. I can also make an outbound call directly from my Outlook inbox, which is really useful too when following up on e-mails.

 

In a broader sense, however, Microsoft is making two big plays into the PBX space. At the low-end they have ResponsePoint and at the higher end they have LCS. LCS is way out of our market segment in terms of price. ResponsePoint is a wait and see. My true sense is that Microsoft doesn’t try to play it tries to win, so the entire PBX market should be pretty scared right now. It may take them five years and 10 versions, but they usually get what they go for.

 

CL: Microsoft and Cisco (News - Alert). They are the two behemoths that have the greatest chance of unifying communications by dominating vs. integrating. Cisco owns the network and Microsoft owns the desktop. Upgrade a Cisco switch and you have IP voice. Upgrade your Microsoft server and add a softphone and you have IP voice. So, right now Cisco has the lead, but Microsoft is coming hard and fast.

 

 

CL: People are not going to give up their favorite communication medium, so in the short term the most successful products will be those that that make existing communications mechanisms work together (cell phone, outlook, text message). But the long term, the play is to offer these services to the end-user in a pre-integrated fashion. Think about a BlackBerry on crack that brings it all together. That is the pot of the gold at the end of the unified rainbow.