The Seamless Enterprise

It’s no surprise that the economy and cloud computing were key discussion points within many sessions and on the exhibit floor at last week’s Gartner IT Expo in Orlando. As usual, the event provided a great opportunity to talk with a significant number of CIOs about their challenges and successes and learn about the latest developments within the IT industry.

One of the more interesting sessions I attended was a debate about who was going to “win” the future of UC: traditional telephony providers (Cisco, Avaya) or software providers (Microsoft, IBM) running at the premise, or would it be in the cloud (Google, Skype)?

I’ve been around long enough to know the reports of the death of traditional service providers are greatly exaggerated (remember Application Service Providers?). I am a bit amused because “cloud computing” these days sounds a lot like “unified communications”, the latest buzzword that is the solution to every problem you’ve ever had (if you believe all the hype). As with UC, there is some real benefit to cloud computing, but it doesn’t come without understanding the available technology and determining whether solutions in the market meet your business needs.

When you start looking specifically at telephony services in the context of cloud computing, you’ll notice that there aren’t really any “cloud” providers who do enterprise-grade voice services (note that I am not including hosted voice services in my definition of “cloud”, since even multi-tenant solutions have limited, if any, virtualization, which I believe is a key element of cloud computing).  That said, given the continuing trend towards consumerization of business, cloud computing does have an opportunity to impact the future of business telephony. 

However cloud computing might be relevant to your business, to be successful it requires a combination of things, but particularly a high-quality network to carry all the traffic back and forth between the clouds. Perhaps we should think of the carriers as the sky. Without the sky, the clouds would hover close to the ground, a thick layer of fog creating all kinds of end user traffic delays.

Bottom line: For cloud computing to really take off among the masses, it’s going to take a combination of services and providers. The best approach for your enterprise will depend on the connectivity and mobility requirements of your end users. So what are your thoughts about telephony service providers and the cloud?

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Tags: Avaya, Cisco, cloud computing, Gartner IT Expo, Google, Microsoft, Skype, Unified communications

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 6:58 am and is filed under Unified communications, cloud computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.