To learn more about this topic, please join me on June 13^th at 11am at an event in Marlborough, MA. Here is the registration link: www.versacomm.com/shoreteldock

The vision of being able to deliver any content or application to any device no matter where a worker is located has eluded IT for over a decade now. The desire to get there is great as it promises to change the way people work and raise the productivity level of employees no matter where they may be. Any inability to fulfill this “any” vision certainly shouldn’t be looked at as reflection of IT. It’s more that the technology didn’t really exist to enable a truly fluid, mobile work environment.

Most companies had to be content with having limited portability versus true mobility. What’s the difference? Let me explain. The legacy “mobile toolkit” consisted of a worker having a corporate-issued laptop with preinstalled company-issued applications. All of a worker’s files and content are also loaded onto the laptop. The worker then carries the laptop around, attaches to a hotspot or other network when not in the office, and connects over a VPN client. Is this really a mobile office? I say it’s not – it’s portable.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Interop and I’ve had some time to think about some of the happenings from the conference. One of the sessions I ran was a panel on the value of session management, and I came away disappointed in the panel responses. Session management has been hyped by the vendors as one of the next big things in Unified Communications. On my panel I had a number of representatives from various UC solution providers and I asked what I thought was a pretty basic question – What are the killer applications for deploying a session management solution?

There was one answer given by all four of my panelists and that was that session management makes it easier to deploy SIP trunking. While this is true, I felt the answer lacked much of the real, long-term value of session management. Here are the primary reasons I think session management needs to be part of every company’s UC strategy:

RIM held its annual “BlackBerry World” conference recently in Orlando and while I didn’t attend the event live, I did have the opportunity to interview a number of people that did and followed the news with great interest.  The messages from RIM since new CEO Thorsten Heins has take the reins have been decidedly enterprise-focused, which makes sense given RIM’s roots. 

However, I do wonder if the tipping point has passed and the demise of RIM is now a fait accompli.  RIM is promising to refocus on the enterprise buyer but does the enterprise buyer really want RIM any more? One of the interesting points that I’ve picked up from the interviews is that, RIM’s last holdout of support, corporate IT, isn’t happy with the company any more.

Yesterday I took some time out of my Enterprise Connect schedule and headed to New York to participate in a cloud event held by Navisite, a leading provider of cloud services. The theme of the event was “Cloud: Beyond ROI,” which I thought was a good topic of conversation for anyone considering the cloud.

Much of what I often hear around the value of cloud is cost-related – pay by glass, it’s cheaper than traditional computing, moving CapEx dollar to OpEx dollars, meaning the value of the cloud is that it’s a cheaper version of what it is replacing. Nothing fundamentally changes, but costs go down.

In 2012, look for the Unified Communications (UC) industry to finally evolve away from using terms like “calls” and “trunks” and replace it with the concept of a “session.” I believe this to be an important step on the road to more pervasive UC deployments, particularly mobile UC.

Why do I believe that? The first step in believing this is to understand what a session is. With voice over IP (VoIP) and UC, the industry uses terms like “calls” to discuss the features in a UC solution. However, this term is a throwback to legacy communications and is used to make new UC solutions look like an old PBX. It reminds me of when I was in college taking a software development class and the lab instructor referred to lines of codes as “job cards.” There were no cards, just lines of code. Similarly today, we aren’t making calls in an all IP world.