Is Web 2.0 Going To Trump Unified Communications?
The buzz in Unified Communications is taking center stage in the communication sector. However the noise of web 2.0 is pounding hard. In this story by infoworld they are saying that social networking is the new enterprise battleground. Or is it?
Here is an interesting snip from Paul Krill in his post at infoworld…
“It’s not clear at this point which category of vendors ultimately is going to deliver more value to the enterprise,” argued Antony Brydon, former CEO and founder of Visible Path, a corporate social networking startup acquired by information services company Hoover’s early this year. He served on a panel session on business social networking at the Social Networking Conference in San Francisco.
IBM, he said, arguably has more employees connected to LinkedIn than to its own Lotus Connections system, Brydon said
“I think we’re in a market that could end up looking a lot like the IM market,” where a consumer product like AOL IM gained dominance in the enterprise, said Brydon. He added he did not take it for granted that companies such as Microsoft would dominate the business social networking space.
Multibillion-dollar social networking companies have been built covering the consumer, collegiate, and professional realms but not yet in the corporate realm, he said.
Are the Unified Communication’s vendors missing the Web 2.0 boat? Will the UC platforms have what users are looking for?
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Just to clarify, IBM has more Lotus Connections profiles inside IBM (over 500K) then they have on LinkedIn. The reason is all IBMers automatically get a Connections profiles while LinkedIn is opt-in. There is one major difference between social networking inside the organization vs consumer driven sites.
on July 14, 2008 @ 12:56 pm
Ted,
Thanks for commenting. I found that quote to be a bit over the top and unverified. Most people don’t know that IBM internally is highly connected.
What also is interesting is how the quote is used to make IBM look irrelevant. Not fair by infoworld.
on July 14, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
[...] John Furrier at BroadDev asks, I think, the right question: [...]
on July 16, 2008 @ 9:00 pm
[...] Another blogger Alex Doyle at BroadSoft (not to be confused with BroadDev - this blog) weights in with a good analysis from my blog post on web 2.0 and Unified Communications. [...]
on July 17, 2008 @ 11:12 am
Great ping from BroadSoft. Alex Doyle has a good post over there at BroadSoft.com.
I am suggesting that UC shouldn’t be a closed solution from one vendor. In fact I see it that the hosting piece is critical for the customers to define their service modules. Having a bolted on fully integrated services isn’t the future. The hosting side is very exciting.
Web 2.0 is not fully understood but from a practical perspective the ‘lock-in’ in UC isn’t viable long term.
BroadDev blog picked the categories to cover UC, Virtualization, Security, and Web 2.0 because to me UC cuts across all those areas. We are so beyond PBX solutions in this arena.
Companies shouldn’t be forced into a choice they should choose the best for their environment.
on July 17, 2008 @ 11:13 am