The Death of the UC ClientThe Death of the UC Client

Who's got the best UC client? Who cares? What matters is how many different clients you can connect with.

Siemens OpenScape was the first true Unified Communications client, introduced back in the mid-2000s, when Microsoft still had OCS in the labs and the Ciscos, Avayas and Nortels of the world were focused on selling IP phones. So it's ironic that Siemens Enterprise Communications' latest major product announcement, unveiled today, contains a significant move away from the notion that every endpoint must run a UC client.

Of course, Siemens isn't killing the OpenScape client, far from it. But with the latest OpenScape release, they're calling attention to a pre-packaged set of integrations called Fusion, that allows end users to expose all the Siemens UC features and capabilities like click to call and IM/presence, from within clients including Outlook, Lotus Notes and Google applications.

In other words, from SEN's perspective, it's not about who owns the desktop. Naturally, they'd like to own the desktop too, but what's critical is to be the engine that drives communications under the covers.

This isn't a totally new idea; with its ACE middleware platform, Avaya is offering its users the ability to connect a Microsoft Lync client with the Avaya Aura session management platform.

Avaya's another example of a company that's not giving up on the desktop, as seen by its push to expand the flashy Flare Experience client to iPads and, eventually, other third-party devices. But I think that, even though this isn't strictly a BYOD story, BYOD has pretty much forced the platform vendors' hands, and made them take a hard look at their endpoint strategies.

On the one hand, as we're seeing with Flare/iPad, BYOD presents enterprise communications vendors with the chance to get their endpoints deployed in new places and use cases. On the other hand, as the device picture fragments, the likelihood of any enteprise client emerging as a true "one client/any device" model looks slim. Better to accept whatever client(s) the end user chooses, and make sure that that client can be a portal into the place where your differentiator really lies: High-scale, high-reliability, highly-functional real-time and near-real-time session management.

Indeed, scale is one of the major elements of today's SEN announcement; the company says OpenScape UC Suite will scale to 500,000 users per system, up from 100,000 today. That kind of scale, combined with a strong virtualization story, is what an enterprise needs to sell a cloud version of its architecture.

Siemens wrapped this product announcement inside a news release and press briefing that focused on a survey they commissioned about UC in the enterprise; you can find some of the key data points from that study at the link. Taken together with the OpenScape announcement, I think you get a good snapshot of where the major platform vendors are in terms of grappling with the new communications reality.

In the IP-PBX world, having a fancy desk phone mattered, while the underlying 450 features were pretty much check-off items. Most of all, incumbency mattered, often trumping everything else. As long as you ran proprietary protocols and took the CIO golfing, you stood a good chance of keeping the account.

In a cloud/mobile/BYOD world, end users increasingly select the end device; the vendor may have the opportunity to deploy its software on that device--or they may not. If their core systems can't support the flexibility that this new world demands, they could wind up being bypassed altogether.

That's not to say that vendors won't offer UC clients and won't try to make money off of their licenses. But who has the "best" UC client won't determine who wins. Whoever has the "most" UC client integration is a much better bet.