The UC, FMC Opportunity Arrives

Do Carriers Care?

Traditionally — if there can be a “traditionally” in such a young space — unified communications and fixed/mobile convergence offerings have been the province of vendors serving enterprises directly, no service provider required. Those operators that have gone in with hosted offers so far have found they can’t quite achieve feature parity with premises-based solutions, or they’ve suffered a lack of clarity in terms of pitching the offer to businesses. Now, collaboration between those two worlds — enterprise vendor and service provider — is yielding a new type of hosted UC offering for the market that hinges on a mobility component and marries the core strengths of both.

But the question is, now that this opportunity finally has arrived, are carriers interested?

The Offerings

Many top vendors now are making platforms that operators can take to create very feature-rich hosted or managed unified communications solutions. A bit part of what the service provider can bring to the table are mobility and network strengths.

“FMC is the voice component of UC, which at the end of the day connects all the bits and pieces under a single umbrella, so when you try and contact someone, you’re not trying to contact a device, be it a mobile, desk phone or soft client — you are trying to contact a person,” said Alastair Westgarth, COO at Tango Networks, whose Abrazo FMC platform essentially bridges enterprise PBXs and UC systems with mobile networks. “The policy and control of enterprise communications belongs to the enterprises and is device-agnostic, and so the mobile and PBX sides must talk together as peers. And at that point, you've got an environment where you can federate services from service providers, and they can use information to become a part of the solution.”

Tango is putting money where its mouth is with a new enterprise femtocell product it’s developed with femto vendor AirWalk Communications and network integration specialist Tatara Systems. Mobile operators can choose it to provide a converged managed service offering that leverages subscriber data.

“This is a further extension of UC,” said Westgarth. “Now that you're pulling presence and location and other things from the operator network and presenting it to the enterprise, they can be more intelligent as to how they route calls. This creates a completely one-stop seamless experience, a world where the enterprise is a peered network, with the ability to decide how they want to peer together with the public carrier and private functionality.”

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) also is supercharging hosted offerings for operators with a new version of WebEx, its business-class Web conferencing service. WebEx is now a linchpin in Cisco’s release 7.0 of its unified communications system. The vendor aims to take the best principles of social networking and Web 2.0, and using WebEx as a sort of mash-up platform, transform the UC-for-business landscape into something more collaborative than previously seen.

The new WebEx Connect is essentially an open development platform that service providers can use to create customized, hosted collaboration clients filled with standard UC applications like click-to-x, instant messaging, team spaces, document management, calendaring and Wikis, but which also can be customized with third-party widgets for things like visual voice mail (offered for free or charged for by developers), built using Cisco’s new open Web services-based APIs. They also can bring their own core mobility services into the mix. It’s Web 2.0 SaaS.

The result? Well, say you’re a local television station. Let’s say traffic monitoring, weather updates and breaking headlines are critical to the delivery of a decent news broadcast. Your WebEx collaboration client might want to include a widget that feeds you information from the National Weather Service, or competitive news bulletins from the cross-town rival, or information from video surveillance cameras mounted on the roof of the building. Then, using the click-to-video functionality or new embedded IM, reporters and meteorologists can discuss the information, screen-popping the information to each other across fixed and mobile devices.

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