Furrier.org – John Furrier's Personal Blog

This is Bill Gates last CEO Summit. Here is the link to his keynote speech where he talks about innovation.

Here at the UC Summit I just sat through a talk by Eric Swift, Microsoft’s Senior Director of Unified Communications, where Eric talks about the innovation of software in the Unified Communications area. This is ironic because Bill Gates has been talking about the impact of software all the time he has been at the helm of Microsoft. Now it seems that Microsoft is poised to move those advances into new emerging areas like Unified Communications. Unified Communications is the Web 2.0 trend in the telephony sector. It’s big.

Eric goes on to say that presence and identity are at the heart of all their software advances for Unified Communications for users and enterprises. He notes that the biggest challenge is the network problems – loss, latency, jitter, delay, connectivity, security, etc…

Eric Swift highlighted the two biggest trends for adoption of Unified Communications – 1) opt-in for users (verses the brut force implementation practices by enterprises), and 2) the massive adoption of ‘hosted’ services.

Note: I asked Eric to talk about how he sees Live Mesh (vis a vis Unified Communication solutions) – He gave a non-answer; It’s clear that Live Mesh is great solution for consumers and possibly much stronger for Small Medium sized Enterprises verses the deep and heavy Microsoft Unified Communications solution. Microsoft has some positioning to do on Live Mesh and their Unified Communications solution.

Overall I was impressed with the notion of software being the major advance for this new trend. I hope the network guys can solve the software problem around DDOS, delay, jitter, loss, connectivity, and security… Until the network issues are resolved video is a pipe dream in Unified Communications.