Come together

CXO. Unified communications offer great promise.  What are the business benefits of a unified communications approach, and what are the particular challenges that need to be overcome for the promise of this solution to be realised?
Mark Deakin. The main business benefit is something I call streamlined communications. This is jumping from one medium of conversation to another. Imagine someone left me a voicemail, I then want to be able to click on a button and to phone them back easily rather than having to manually type their number into the telephone. If we then start to talk over email, I want to be able to take it from an email and convert it over to an IM conversation easily without having to figure out that person's IM address. What we try and do is make it easy to jump from one media to another.

The biggest problem is linking all those distributed systems.  So the reason that you haven't been able to do that until now is because the telephony world and the desktop world have been very much separate. So what we're trying to do is stop the telephone being on its own island and bring it back onto the desktop where quite a lot of people spend their time.

CXO. What kind of emerging technologies are driving that change? How do you integrate the phone back in with the PC and guarantee the quality, speed and reliability?
MD. The obvious one would be VoIP, but I wouldn’t say that it’s the be all and end all. What we tend to find is that things like IM presence are just as important. What that means is when you try and make a telephone call you should know whether the person you’re calling is there or not and you should then the number should dial automatically.

The second layer for us is doing some intelligent presence. So when I pick up the telephone, it changes my status to in call, so that people know that I'm on the phone. If I'm doing a presentation, it'll set it to do not disturb, which means that nothing is going to pop up while you’re presenting for your customers. 

As for the quality side of things, what we try and do is we don't assume that quality of service is there. We have some intelligent technology that figures out that it's a slower connection or reduced amounts of bandwidth, and deals with that a lot better than some of the other solutions tend to.

CXO. What can be done in the short term to drive this kind of communication technology uptake in Europe?
MD. It's a matter of embracing the technology rather than fearing it. So things like IM presence, which I mentioned already. The other thing is looking at it slightly different than how people do now. They very much look at VoIP as being a cost saving mechanism. So what we'll do is we'll take our telephones, we'll put a different piece of wire. You know, so rather than go over the normal network, they go over the IP network.  And that's kind of as far as they take it.

What would make more sense is to think about it differently. Why does your voice mail go into a separate place than your email? Why don't they both go to into Outlook or whatever tool it is you use? Why not make all the other ways in which you communicate more efficient as well?

CXO. As mobile and wireless devices become increasingly ubiquitous, are security issues becoming more of a concern? How is sensitive personal and company data being protected?
MD. An element of making anything more mobile and more accessible means that more people are able to get access to it, which raises security issues. You have to enable people to access the information, but be sure it's secure. Or you just close everything down and don't let them use it. Obviously, the latter is not the way to go. By making it more secure, what we do is make our devices secure by default, secure by design, and then secure by deployment. One example would be ensuring everything goes over a secure channel. We wrap security around the telephone call or the instant message or whatever piece of information it is we're sending.

Mark Deakin is UK Unified Communications Manager for Microsoft. Deakin has a keen professional and personal interest in instant messaging and presence technologies, and having been involved in the industry from the early days of Exchange IM to the full-featured Office Communication Server 2007 we see today. Deakin has an in depth knowledge of the maturing technologies currently available and regularly discusses his experience at http://blogs.technet.com/markdea.