Communications Now Pervades Apps
Global IP Solutions says Oracle will incorporate the GIPS VoiceEngine Multimedia LSVX video codec into Oracle Communicator, a SIP/SIMPLE-based PC softphone client that allows communications service providers to set up sessions including voice and video calling, presence status and instant messaging.
You might wonder what Oracle is doing in the VoIP client business, but Communicator is the client side of Oracle’s Communication and Mobility Server business. Oracle servers create VoIP, instant messaging and presence-enabled applications. In other words, Oracle already supports “plain vanilla” residential VoIP and virtual private branch exchange applications.
The new codec will be used to enable enterprise video calling from user directories, and is one more example of how collaboration (communications) features are becoming strategic features of end user applications in both the enterprise and consumer spaces.
The new capabilities will allow developers to build, deploy and manage converged applications that combine SIP and Web capabilities. And though there is a tendency in the communications service provider business to think about “communications” in a physical sense (wires, ports, bandwidth, protocols, interfaces, management of network elements and applications), “communications” is changing in a logical sense as well.
In the old world, managements would restrict and control who had access to information, how they had access and when they had access. Knowledge was centralized, hard to move around and hard to present in ways that were useful.
In the new world, information and knowledge are easier, if not easy, to move around, are stored on a distributed basis, highly mobile and accessible, with response in real time or close to real time. And it is “social” networking of the blog, wiki, tagging sort that is driving the change.
Needless to say, communications sit at the heart of this way of handling information and knowledge. Users cannot collaborate, create and tear down “communities” built around particular projects, customers or tasks without communications. It just doesn’t work. And people need to communicate from within the context of what they are doing.
If you have a temporary or permanent community built around a particular project, and all the key information about the project is on a single wiki or blog, team members need to post, respond and communicate directly from within the wiki or blog. They shouldn’t have to pop out of the session to send an email, set up a text chat, launch a video conference or voice session.
And that is pretty much why Oracle would be interested in video communications. It already provides voice communications. And those capabilities, plus knowledge of who is available to communicate at the moment (presence), plus text-based messaging, have everything to do with the value of all the other processes and applications people now work with.
It might seem quite abstract, but the changes in computing and communications architectures over the past several decades now are moving to a new stage where communications capabilities are essential. And that’s why it is crucial for legacy communications providers to grasp the significance of the change.
The architectural changes directly shape “control” over applications, and control over applications directly shapes the ability to leverage collaboration for any enterprise purpose, from serving customers better to sales, solution or business development.
And in that regard, control over information, data and knowledge has a direct bearing on how fast, how effectively and how flexibly enterprise members can find and use already-existing enterprise skills, expertise and knowledge.
Information technology staffs, in the era of the mainframe, had complete control over user applications. The locked “glass room” was symbolic. If users wanted an application, they submitted a written request.
All that changed when we shifted to the client-server architecture. IT still maintained policy control, but short of physically disabling PCs, users were able to install and run their own applications.
We now are moving into an era of Web-based architectures where IT has even less control than it used to. According to analysts at the Yankee Group, 31 percent of surveyed enterprise end users said they have “complete control” over the applications loaded on their machines. Just 13 percent said the IT department has complete control.
About 21 percent said they share control with IT. And 16 percent said they have more control than IT does, while 18 percent said IT had more control. In 55 percent of cases, then, there is sharing of control over applications run on end user PCs.
About 49 percent reported that their personal (consumer) applications were more advanced than the enterprise apps, and 86 percent use at least one “consumer” application for work purposes.
The whole point is that in this new architectural era, control interferes with creative use of peoples’ knowledge and skills when applied to existing institutional memory as represented by what the enterprise already “knows” about particular customers, the history of the interactions, the state of the supply chain used to fulfill customer requirements and so forth.
Communications is central to the new architecture because the logical architecture of how work gets done will require fluidity. As “search” makes information discovery more fluid in one way, so wikis, blogs, instant messaging and other tools make collaboration more fluid. It simply isn’t possible to use the tools in value-creating ways unless people have a great deal more access to data and knowledge stores, and can manipulate and communicate that knowledge quickly.
The underlying change here as it pertains to the service provider business is that “communications” used to be a business relationship whereby a buyer procured use of a set of tools to “talk.” In the future, communications will extend beyond that to a whole logical architecture where “what we collectively know” actually can be used by enterprise associates to solve problems. IP
