Why We Need InteroperabilityWhy We Need Interoperability

Hardy Myers, CEO of AVST, made a great point in today's Webinar, regarding the importance of interoperability in IP-telephony and, even more so, in Unified Communications.

Hardy Myers, CEO of AVST, made a great point in today's Webinar, regarding the importance of interoperability in IP-telephony and, even more so, in Unified Communications.Our first poll question asked the audience what percentage of their end users had IPT-enabled phones. Almost three-quarters of the 200-some respondents had fewer than 25% of their end-stations migrated over.

What that told Hardy, and the rest of our panel, was something that we kind of already knew, which was that this is a very long process, to get to complete IPT throughout the enterprise.

So now you make this more of a moving target by adding Unified Communications--a raft of new functionality residing within software on various servers, connecting into the platform, and you start to see that a lack of standards makes it a lot more difficult to engage in multi-year, wide-scale planning about how to deliver certain functionality to your users.

Not that this has ever been easy. When Ethernet and 802.11 wireless LANs were going through their respsective growth spurts, vendors managed to build pre-standard versions that let them deliver the required features before official interoperability standards could be cast in stone. But in that case, end users pretty adamantly refused to buy until there was solid assurance that the pre-standard products would be easily upgradeable upon ratification of the standard.

We're nowhere near that level of industry coordination or, frankly, user demand when it comes to UC, or even basic IPT functionality via SIP. And as I wrote earlier, absent those two elements of coordination and demand, there's no reason to expect the core vendors to drive this process.