There was a lot of talk at VoiceCon about taking a "Best of Breed" approach: use Cisco for the PBX, use Microsoft for e-mail, use SameTime to do IM (heck have ½ your users on SameTime, ½ on OCS), use google doc. Use openSER or asterisk or whatever! It should all work togther.
All of this sounds great: you "leverage your existing investments" e.g. keep around the suff you have and try to make it work together. How perfect! Now if we could just get everyone to sit down and make sure that all their stuff works with everyone else’s stuff – we’d be lovn’ it!!
Well, here’s my gripe… in reality, this doesn’t work too well:
- Too much custom integration work
- Support is crappy – lots of finger pointing
- You’re locked into the supported interop versions from each vendor.
And really, it was mostly the players that didn’t have a complete offering who were most in favor of the best-of-breed. Similarly it was the smaller players clamoring for everyone to come up with a new standard so everyone can play nicely.
I’d really love it if it all worked. But for my money – I’d rather take a whole solution from a vendor, warts and all. I would rather sit down and determine who had the best vision, the most holistic approach to communications, and throw my time, effort, and money behind them.
Of course, I’m on board with the Microsoft vision, that’s why I’m in the MS consulting business. But I have to respect people who say: "You know what, Cisco may not do everything perfectly, but we think they are right for us. We’re going Cisco." I may disagree with the decision, but I see the benefits of taking the good with the bad.
To just try to cobble together a solution from parts laying around the shop floor trades vision for short-term gain. I just don’t see that paying off as a strategy.
What to do?
Now I’m not advocating that MS or Cisco or IBM grow a platform to be a "one-size-fits-all" behemoth.
But what I am looking for is a vendor whose approach is holistic and lays a foundation to touch all different modes of communications. And then, most importantly, provides an open platform for others to develop applications that work with / within the framework.
This is a big reason why I favor the MS approach today – the SDKs, the code, the app samples are all out there for people and companies to write apps that integrate with OCS / Exchange. And sell them and make money from them. Heck, this is how Cisco produced CUPIMOC. This is a good approach.
People are used to knocking MS for not being open or standards-based. A lot of those knocks are probably well-deserved. But the UC platform MS is extensible and does let people write business critical apps that hook into it.
IBM’s approach is similar and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve always felt their offering was in the right general ballpark. I understand that Cisco is now moving towards this same type of vision with their extensible client framework.
Conclusions
It’s not a matter of best-of-breed – that’s an outdated way of looking at things. It’s about who offers the most extensible platform that’s most easily adapted for customer’s needs. This battle isn’t over who has the best PBX or the most features. It’s about who has the right platform that offers the most opportunities to refine and perfect communications.
That’s why I continue to think that this is primarily a battle between MS and Cisco, with IBM lurking on the horizon. All three have the power and the position to be able to offer such platforms.
