Interoperability: Piecing Together SolutionsInteroperability: Piecing Together Solutions
One-off interoperation is growing--but in many ways, that's as much of a headache as a solution. Can "federation clouds" solve the problem?
October 4, 2012
One-off interoperation is growing--but in many ways, that's as much of a headache as a solution. Can "federation clouds" solve the problem?
We kicked off the Collaboration Track at Interop yesterday with a session on Unified Communications Interoperability, led by Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting/UCStrategies and Russell Bennett of UC Insights, and my takeaway was that while there are a fair number of examples of one-off interoperability, this is obviously a problem that scales up pretty quickly, and the only real long-term solution might be having a service in the middle of all those less-than-fully-interoperable vendors' systems.
We see the model for this in the video world, where providers like Blue Jeans and Vidtel act as an intermediary, providing the middleware that allows diverse endpoints from all the major vendors, including Cisco/Tandberg, Polycom, Microsoft Lync, Skype, and others to talk directly.
I'd suggested earlier this year that this approach was overdue for the broader UC suite, and it looks like some companies are rising to the challenge. In his portion of the Interop presentation, Russell mentioned a company out of Sunnyvale, CA called Nextplane, which bills itself as offering the kind of "federation cloud" that would allow enterprises to effect a kind of hub-and-spoke interoperability architecture, rather than having to arduously build a mesh of multi-vendor one-off interoperations.
NextPlane's website claims that they can federate presence among Microsoft Lync and its previous generations, with systems from Cisco, IBM, Google, and Jive. This is obviously not a comprehensive list of all the vendors an enterprise would need to federate, Avaya being the most notable omission. It's also federation only for presence/chat, and not the full suite of UC applications.
But it's a start, and it's one that Russell Bennett told the audience is a welcome one. "I think that this is the future of UC federation, frankly," Russell said.
