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A Fair PointA Fair Point

One of the commenters on yesterday's D'Ambrosio story makes a good point: "Companies like Avaya/Nortel/Cisco are comfortable being considered 'legacy voice' against Microsoft and IBM.....as long as you label THOSE companies as LEGACY software providers. Let's run real time applications in Vista with proprietary protocols.... that will work..."

Eric Krapf

June 11, 2008

2 Min Read
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One of the commenters on yesterday's D'Ambrosio story makes a good point: "Companies like Avaya/Nortel/Cisco are comfortable being considered 'legacy voice' against Microsoft and IBM.....as long as you label THOSE companies as LEGACY software providers. Let's run real time applications in Vista with proprietary protocols.... that will work..."

One of the commenters on yesterday's D'Ambrosio story makes a good point: "Companies like Avaya/Nortel/Cisco are comfortable being considered 'legacy voice' against Microsoft and IBM.....as long as you label THOSE companies as LEGACY software providers. Let's run real time applications in Vista with proprietary protocols.... that will work..."You know, I can't argue much with that. If "legacy voice" is meant to connote proprietary, inflexible (also reliable, high-quality, of course), then it's fair to drop a perjorative "legacy" modifier in front of "enterprise software," suggesting all the things about business software that could pose problems for its use in Unified Communications.

You could argue that it's more appropriate to put the weight of the "legacy" burden on voice because the voice model is moving toward software, not vice versa. On the other hand, as long as the negative aspects of legacy software remain, that migration actually isn't likely to happen to a significant degree.

The whole semantic argument here kind of points out the straw-man nature of the way the 2 sides market against each other. It also points to the way forward: Business-critical applications, including but not limited to voice, increasingly have to be written with performance characteristics across IP networks as a foremost concern. That's happening now, but it has to happen more. That means application developers, network infrastructure specialists, and telecom experts will have to work much more closely together than ever before.

If they do, they'll leave a worthwhile legacy to the next generation.

About the Author

Eric Krapf

Eric Krapf is General Manager and Program Co-Chair for Enterprise Connect, the leading conference/exhibition and online events brand in the enterprise communications industry. He has been Enterprise Connect.s Program Co-Chair for over a decade. He is also publisher of No Jitter, the Enterprise Connect community.s daily news and analysis website.
 

Eric served as editor of No Jitter from its founding in 2007 until taking over as publisher in 2015. From 1996 to 2004, Eric was managing editor of Business Communications Review (BCR) magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry.
 

Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.