There's no doubt, what with Microsoft making Unified Communications its next growth target and Cisco adding "Unified Communications" to the end of television spots, that the industry has coallesced around real-time person-to-person collaboration as the key driver of the next few years.
InfoTech Analyst Warren Williams, who follows the market for monitoring PBXs and the rest of the converged communications environment, says there is one potential risk that concerns the big PBX vendors and carriers about what they've embarked on: a highly visible outage of communications at one of their customers. That, plus the need for greater vigilance as the telephony switching moves from bullet-proof hardware to software running on commodity hardware, has Williams projecting rapid growth in the monitoring business.
The PBX vendors aren't able to really "outage proof" Unified Communications by themselves. Converged communications environments are by their very nature multi-vendor, which means an approach borne of listening to alarms coming in from a modem attached to the PBX misses the mark.
Equal attention to all of the equipment involved in delivering Unified Communications is required. One vulnerability occurs at the hand-off gateways between different voice servers. Another is the result of the interdependencies among the multi-tier stack of logical servers running the collaborative application mash-up of email, IM, video conferencing, and web conference sessions. All elements end-to-end must be watched and their behavior correlated. Without this comprehensive approach -- the kind implemented in Communicado Streamline, by the way -- the vendors fears of highly visible outages are sure to come to pass.
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