Had that trend continued, Wi-Fi would have had limited success, at best, and at worst, it would have failed. Through certification outside the standards body, we can connect nearly any wireless node to another and this fueled the uptake of wireless in both the consumer and enterprise markets. Trying to force customers to by from a single source is self-limiting.
The telecom market grew up in a time with the carriers dictated the equipment, services and price for telecommunications services. Remember $50 handsets (in 1970's dollars)? The UC market can't follow in the footsteps of the telecom market. Well, it can, but it won't reach anyway near it's potential. Enterprises are sick of acquiring silos of equipment through mergers and acquisitions that are too expensive to migrate from and too expensive to let continue. Verizon's announcement about their new Immersive Video, for example, is a case in point. It's great -- if you and everyone you want to talk to are Verizon customers and use Cisco's telepresence equipment. It's not so great if those you want to talk to are on different services and use non-Cisco equipment. The problem is twofold, which Verizon admits. The first is the lack of interoperability and standardization for carriers to hand off SIP based calls to each other, and the second is a lack of standards for unified communications among software and equipment vendors.
Pat Gavin Galvin, CTO of Unified Communications for IBM, made the great point that there is room for UC vendors to software vendors, service providers and equipment vendors to develop and prove basic interoperability functionality. With voice, that means handsets can communicate seamlessly. For video, displays and camera can transmit and receive video and audio. Software systems can seamlessly negotiate and insert the right protocols and codecs on demand. There is also room for vendors to provide the additional features that only exist within their own product lines or chosen partners like smart-scheduling, presence management, and so on.
The bottom line is that price is not the reason that customers are not buying UC. They aren't buying it because UC within an enterprise isn't valuable enough to justify the cost, but if they can extend their UC to their own partners and customers, they will have a financial incentive to adopt UC.
