A few years ago, you had answering machines. These machines were attached to the telephone lines and programmed to accept the call after four rings or 20 seconds and stored the message for you to play back.
A small tape recorder with microphone attached to the phone line was the first step to Unified Communications.
Today finding a stand alone answering machine is hard. Telecommunication has come a long way, you now carry your phone with you, you can program your home phone to call you, your voice mail and email follows you and with the use of internet you can be connected where ever you are with your email and voice mail.
UC has grown from a simple voice mail storage to email and voice mail integrator to, a powerful system that can integrate, all your communications, store them, forward them and connect you face to face using video.
Applications like Skype have integrated and connected people world wide and for free. A telecom CTO recently told me on how uses Skype to connect with his kids and friends around the world. In this view this was the best application ever invented because he can see them and talk to them for free. While Skype took a lot of their customers, it still provided him personally to make free calls and talk to his people. He wondered how would they ever make money. Giving services for free and charging for premium services is norm these days, and we can already see the direction of communications going forward.
Vendors are pitching the Unified Communications solutions - a solution that allows you to connect, manage, visit and exchange ideas using the existing connections. Having the ability to check on the presence of the employee/person and their availability, having the ability to have a clear video call and being able to clearly exchange ideas on a video conference platform is all a part of UC.
Service Providers now greatly affected by providers like Skype are trying to get back to the same market by building TelePresence solutions for business. To be able to share and exchange ideas in a secure environment and having the service providers maintain the infrastructure while providing a service solution. With cloud computing and solutions where applications are provided as a service the next generation Software as a Service solutions has made the service providers come up with Cloud base Service as a Service. A solution where enterprises can lease the infrastructure as needed to conduct their business as needed from their network in a secure environment is the key to success. Grouped as a Cloud services, integrating storage, applications, email, unified communications and telepresence there are lot of players who claim to provide a complete integrated services for a fraction of the cost.
Small business and large business are generally open to the idea of having a solution in place that can be used as necessary. As enterprises move into the digital world, integrating all types of communications into their Enterprise Content Management systems, UC plays a vital role by providing a easy access to email, video, audio communications integrated within the corporate content system. This enables organizations to reduce paper work, integrate all communications and setup systems to retrieve data for external and internal use in a secure role based access solution. As a first step service providers are building applications that can store and search email, voice mail communications directly to your content management systems. Video data from telepresence and individual systems will be the next, thus leading to a fully integrated digital storage system to store all types of data and content.
Soon there will be BI systems that can be integrated to run user specific reports and data mining tools to collect the data and provide accurate information on business. In Part II we will discuss where UC is today and integration with ECM and its future.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Google+ - What will it do to Facebook
MySpace called it a day, other social networking sites are slowly but surely looking to facebook. What is the charm that facebook has? Everyone you know has a facebook account, and everyone has a reason. The primary reason - friends it enables us to reach out to long lost friends and connect with each other. Well there is more to it, there is news feeds, there is adds and there is now the new photo tag - basically creating a database of faces. With data comes data-mining and data gets sold.
Naturally Google is left out and it wants in. Thus Google+, but really as an individual or as a business would have multiple accounts? One for facebook and one for Google+? Will you have the same data at both locations? Will you leave all your facebook friends and make new "plusers" on google?
Google is late to the game and for them to succeed you need more than a facebook clone, not just integration of messaging, video, audio and communications. You need more to attract the friends to become plusers. First and foremost you would need a tool or an app that can take a facebook friend and connect them to Google+. Which means facebook will now have another app that will do the exact opposite - making a pluser to a friend.
Second you need to make sure you offer what each other offers just a tad bit better. Over all if you really need to succeed in this - you need something new.
Something new that gives control to the individual, to create their own social networking circles that will allow them to share information for a brief period of time. Think of it like having garage sale - A setup that you can have a few days to make your friends/plusers visit your social circle, exchange idea, traditions and engage in some activity. There is some money to be made here and one who does this first will be the winner.
Social networks have come to the age where they are just another site on the web, they can make things happen if people are able to join and make them move, else it is another web page like geo-cities. The first to provide control for individuals and the first to engage individuals in an data exchange to build small societies around them will be the ultimate winner.
Naturally Google is left out and it wants in. Thus Google+, but really as an individual or as a business would have multiple accounts? One for facebook and one for Google+? Will you have the same data at both locations? Will you leave all your facebook friends and make new "plusers" on google?
Google is late to the game and for them to succeed you need more than a facebook clone, not just integration of messaging, video, audio and communications. You need more to attract the friends to become plusers. First and foremost you would need a tool or an app that can take a facebook friend and connect them to Google+. Which means facebook will now have another app that will do the exact opposite - making a pluser to a friend.
Second you need to make sure you offer what each other offers just a tad bit better. Over all if you really need to succeed in this - you need something new.
Something new that gives control to the individual, to create their own social networking circles that will allow them to share information for a brief period of time. Think of it like having garage sale - A setup that you can have a few days to make your friends/plusers visit your social circle, exchange idea, traditions and engage in some activity. There is some money to be made here and one who does this first will be the winner.
Social networks have come to the age where they are just another site on the web, they can make things happen if people are able to join and make them move, else it is another web page like geo-cities. The first to provide control for individuals and the first to engage individuals in an data exchange to build small societies around them will be the ultimate winner.
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