From PBX Vendors to Middleware VendorsFrom PBX Vendors to Middleware Vendors

Definitely read Brian's post below. The headline is federation, but another major insight has to do with middleware.

Definitely read Brian's post below. The headline is federation, but another major insight has to do with middleware.When I talked to Mark Straton of Siemens awhile back, Mark talked about OpenScape as becoming more of a middleware play than a client play, and the idea of OpenScape as middleware also turns up in Brian Riggs' Lotusphere quest for federated presence.

Incidentally, Allan Sulkin, the leading "PBX" market analyst, has started using this very term, "federated presence" to describe what the PBX vendors are evolving into. It makes sense: If Microsoft and IBM (and Cisco?) are going to own the desktop, together with the likes of Oracle and SAP, then there's a role for the former PBX to play as a broker of the sort that Brian describes.

It's interesting to me that once Brian started asking around, he discovered that some systems such as NEC's and Siemens' already support some federated presence capability. The fact that they haven't made this widely known suggests that either these companies (and those that don't support federated presence) don't appreciate the potential value of this function; or that users aren't yet demanding it, at least in large enough numbers to get the vendors' attention. I'm inclined to think it's the latter, because this whole field of Unified Communications and presence is still in its early stages. But for enterprises that are starting to explore UC, this is a question worth asking your vendor.