Google Puts a "Star" on Location, But Where is UC?Google Puts a "Star" on Location, But Where is UC?

It's frightening to see how far enterprise suppliers have fallen behind. I'm afraid it may be a byproduct of planning decisions made by people who cannot divorce themselves from a legacy of wired telephony.

I don't usually cover personnel changes, but some assignments are just that important. Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search, has been placed in charge of the company's location-based services. She was also appointed to Google's operating committee, an advisory board that counsels CEO Eric Schmidt--not bad for a 35-year old! In the announcement Google stated, "Marissa is moving over to an exciting new role covering geo/local, which is crucial to our users and the future of Google".

Once again consumer services are leaving enterprise offerings in the dust. Everyone seems to agree that presence is going to be critical to unified communications (UC), but without the ability to determine a user's presence status automatically, the whole idea falls apart. Given the nature of modern business, using time clocks or calendar entries to intuit a user's availability is simply unworkable in the real world. The most effective determinant of availability is still texting someone to see if they can take a call (i.e. "Pinging for people").

Enterprise suppliers seem to understand that location is important, but they have simply been unable to do much about it. IBM's Sametime lets remote users register the location where they connect to the network and subsequent users who show up with the same IP address can be identified as being in the same place. That will pin your location down to a city or potentially a building. Microsoft's newest version of Lync includes a location capability but it only works if the user is connecting via Wi-Fi and can only locate them to an access point (i.e. an accuracy of around 10,000 square feet). Neither of those is tied to presence status.

Location with decent accuracy needs either GPS or a Wi-Fi location system. GPS may fail completely indoors, but Wi-Fi location appliances like those from AeroScout can estimate a user's location down to a few meters. Skyhook pioneered the idea of recording the location of Wi-Fi access points as a location alternative to GPS, and Google has been actively developing a similar Wi-Fi location database.

Where location technologies exist, it is the consumer services rather than the enterprise vendors who are putting them to use. Google was an early though ineffective participant when they acquired Dodgeball in 2005, but they shut it down in 2009.

Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley went on to co-found Foursquare, a service where users are awarded points and badges for visiting locations. Frequent visitors to a place can become the "mayor" of that place and the company is looking to monetize the idea by working with local businesses on joint promotions. Facebook also launched a check-in feature recently, and it seems to be growing in popularity (but not with me).

Facebook and Foursquare have capabilities that mirror the type of location-based presence we would need in a UC implementation, but there are now countless mobile applications from Flixster to Superpages that use the location capabilities of your phone to point you to services. Google’s interest is clearly based on the recognition that by coupling location with search, they could offer a much richer service and provide a wealth of information about the occupants of that location.

Conclusion
In the enterprise market, VoIP-based voice solutions have overtaken TDM PBXs and now the focus has shifted to whether software-based solutions like Lync will in turn overtake them. In the meantime however, the capabilities of consumer UC solutions have leapt to another level entirely. So within the cozy confines of the enterprise market we have one small battle brewing, but viewed in the context of the overall market, it's frightening to see how far enterprise suppliers have fallen behind. I'm afraid it may be a byproduct of planning decisions made by people who cannot divorce themselves from a legacy of wired telephony. UC is "Communications integrated to optimize business processes", and if you want to impact "business processes", you better start thinking about location.