In other words, Web developers can build communications-enabled apps “without knowing anything about communications.” Genius!

As characterized by Hussain, ACE is the product of marketing “pull” that crosses several functional areas in an enterprise. Demand starts at the functional level, where platform incompatibilities may have thwarted a departmental head’s efforts to reap the benefits promised by providers of “unified communications.” ACE comes to the rescue with shrink-wrapped “connectors” for Cisco, Avaya (including the vestiges of the Nortel CMS line), Tandberg (video endpoints), IBM SameTime, and Microsoft OCS. Thus Avaya makes it possible to overcome incompatibilities with a single DVD that runs on a couple of servers and carries a list price of $10,000-$12,000 for the core license plus per user fees of $50-$100.

As for common use cases, Hussain provided profiles of implementations at a number of global businesses. For example a multi-branch global bank provided a form of “follow-me” connectivity by providing “hot desks” for itinerant executives. The service integrates a voice network that includes IP-PBXs from both Avaya and Cisco with presence management and call origination based on IBM Sametime. In other instances, the ACE SDK was used to “communications enable” business processes and workflows with APIs to CRM and knowledge management systems to support better medical care or customer care in financial services.

Architecturally, ACE resides “on top of” Aura, Avaya’s branded middleware SIP-based communications. Hussain explained that Avaya’s product offering has changed so that ACE will emerge as the application development environment for Aura as well as multivendor environments, and that the “lower layer toolkit (back into Aura Session Manager) will be ACE.”

Hussain, who is a veteran of the “Nortel side of Avaya”, was especially pleased that ACE is now a part of Avaya’s DevConnect program, referring to Avaya’s community of 3rd party developers, acknowledging that this sort of program was “missing at Nortel.”

Avaya is on the right track with ACE. It is putting tools into the hands of the people that are driving enterprise-wide innovation and making sure that key elements of Avaya’s existing fabric for call-handling, voice processing and multi-media interactions remains entrenched in multi-vendor solutions. The short list of supported vendors – IBM, Microsoft, Cisco/Tandberg – is not as “open” as might be ideal, but it does represent a high percentage of Avaya’s current market space.

Looking back on the event, I believe that Cisco has introduced two radical new products that have game-changing potential in that they employ “auto-discovery” to broaden the reach of the IP-cloud and deepen its ability to help individuals find others who share interests, activities and responsibilities. Collectively, they improve IP-based networks’ ability to support rapid formation of teams to tackle business tasks quickly and efficiently.

The first product is called the Intercompany Media Exchange (IME). This new feature of the core Unified Communications Manager (UCM) platform provides a mechanism for an ordinary phone call to initiate the process of recruiting and authenticating new members into an IP-based cloud that transcends enterprise boundaries. Once a “phone” (meaning an IP-telephony end-point that can be a physical phone, softphone, videoconferencing device, or other) is authenticated, it will be as if it is part of a shared network for future IP-based chat, phone conversations, video sessions and collaboration.

There are some pre-requisites of course. The IT managers at both firms must install and enable IME on their UCM platforms. But once that is done, initiation of the service is the product of auto-discovery. When that first phone call is complete, a process begins whereby the UCM platforms confirm that the call did, indeed, originate from the phone ascribed to a particular IP address. Ditto for the destination phone. Future calls between the two endpoints are routed through the IP cloud. It eases the migration from the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to the IP-cloud in a secure way that, if all goes well with the IETF, will become a standard for luring new traffic into the cloud.

Auto-discovery figures prominently in the social fabric created by a new product called Cisco Pulse. It is an idea that was conceived in Cisco Advanced Technology group two years ago. It uses employee generated content – in the form of emails, blog posts and even telepresence sessions – to impute areas of interest and activity. These can be converted into “tags” which are the raw material for the directory embedded in the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP). Tags are created dynamically in near-real-time and they can become an important part of team building by enabling employees to discover others who are working on similar tasks or projects. For media feeds (such as phone-based teleconferences or the audio portion of videoconferences) the system doesn’t capture and transcribe the entire session, but it does use word-spotting techniques to identify recurring topics and phrases that can be translated into tags.

Admittedly, Pulse walks the fine line between surveillance and collaboration. However, in this age of multi-tasking and constant interruptions, many of people (like me) can lose sight of the many projects underway. As for including a complete list of interests or areas of expertise in a public profile, that’s always been the weak link in efforts to build effective social networks inside an enterprise or multi-enterprise team. Pulse is destined to be controversial. There is a Big Brother aspect to the whole process of collecting data and assigning tags to individuals. The next step should be to give end users ultimate control over their public profiles (including machine-generated tags). But, as I mention in this video with Tony Frazier, a Sr. Product Manager for Pulse, the service can be both a memory aid (what am I working on?) and a mechanism for self-discovery.

Cisco deserves credit for adding so many new features and functions to the enterprise IP-backbone. Assembled solutions largely from acquired firms (like adding the WebEx brand to the PostPath email service). It, rightly, moves the industry beyond a pre-occupation with “unified communications” for UC’s sake and has developed a foundation for greater efficiency and resultant cost-savings by disassembling and reassembling network and computing elements. It is the enterprise flavor of Recombinant Telephony.

The latter piece – the Enterprise Collaboration Server – is a missing link in social networking that many IT professionals have longed for. It gives enterprise employees the ability to create “buddy lists” (okay they call them “team spaces”) on the fly so that they can use an IM-like client to do all the things that are packed into today’s IP-based communications experience. That means they can detect present status (online, offiline, available, interruptible), chat, talk, conference and videoconference. In effect, it creates a portal through which employees can define the ways in which they want to collaborate without compromising network security or violating accepted business practices.

Tomorrow’s a big day. At 3PM (Pacific Time), CEO John Chambers will deliver the keynote (and kick-off) address for the Cisco Collaboration Summit. If past is prologue, he will give a vivid portrayal of the value of Collaboration with many specific use cases and customer testimonials. He will link market needs to Cisco’s range of products that fulfill those needs, and he will display the range of products and services from WebEx through Jabber and Tanberg, that Cisco has knit into a coherent platform for collaboration.

To use a tennis metaphor, the initial serve and volley between Dryburgh and Gouran turned into an exchange of groundstrokes that revealed that both players have impressive backhands. Meanwhile, York’s commentary, which takes a decidedly technical approach to whether it is practical for Skype to support so-called “P2P-SIP” connections, spurred another round of online discussion regarding the VoIP giant’s strategy for future survival and ultimately growth.

Yet, on Thursday Oct 15, Phil Wolff posted this article under the headline “Why Collaboration is strategic for Skype”. In it he practically renders the “P2P-SIP” question moot by declaring that “collaboration”, in its many forms, is the next must-have feature for Skype. It’s a compelling argument. Many of us have learned the hard way that users regard voice as a commodity. Skype built its much vaunted “reach” as a free, or very low-cost substitute for international phone calls. Only a small percentage of the hundreds of millions of users spring for services that carry a price tag, such as Skype Out to initiate calls to traditional phone numbers, or other call management features.

As Wolff correctly notes, “Skype everywhere” has been the goal of the company for a number of years. A number of developers in the Recombinant Telephony world are already building interesting apps with Skype talking to Asterisk and a skinnier Skype client supporting larger communities of talkers. In his post, Dan York notes that Skype constantly hires engineers with deep knowledge and experience with SIP. So P2P-to-SIP or P2P using SIP schema are pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Which leads us back to Wolff’s central belief that such a switch is simply not enough. The next generation of Skype must be transformational (and it is very much underway). It involves making it much, much easier for Skype users to collaborate in meaningful ways with one another. It brings in voice, video, screen sharing, conferencing, task distribution and other so-called “productivity enhancers”.

Skype could advance the best collaboration practices and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and building economic security.

That’s a pretty good headstart versus the firms whose beachhead is IM, UC or videoconferencing.

For those of you who have not seen the Wave “home screen” before, the video gives you a glimpse. Warning: It involves learning a new set of terminology where interactions among “buddies”, “friends”, or “associates” are organized into “Waves” and each Wave is composed of a number of “blips.” In the SalesForce video, you see the Wave “home screen”. It resembles a Web-based email client but has several attributes of a social network, IM client and conferencing utility.

In the use case illustrated in the SalesForce.com demo, we’re looking at the home screen of a wireless customer seeking technical support by initiating a “Wave” with a ‘bot that is operated by the carrier. This is a glimpse of the future of Web-based, multi-modal self service, illustrating the benefits of tight integration between self-service logic and “cloud-based” CRM resources. Bear in mind that the business logic and “dialogues” generated by the system to support the “robot” could also be rendered as spoken words in an IVR, which is a capability that SalesForce.com has already demonstrated in conjunction with “voice-in-the-cloud” specialists like this offer from Angel.com.

Wave’s roll out is a signal moment in Recombinant Telephony. So far it has been received with very mixed reviews, with one luminary (Robert Scoble) calling it “the worst of email and IM rolled into one.” I disagree. While the “Preview” has a number of flaws — discovering new contacts and cool extensions is difficult, and it is hard to tell when you are actively engaged with a fellow collaborator — it has inspired a tremendous amount of creativity and will, over the next few years, prove valuable for collaborative communications, customer care and combinations of the two.

The process of building and supporting hundreds of millions of personalized portals creates a huge business opportunity for Big Blue. The prospects are very good as the company as acceptance grows for blogging, tagging, social networks coupled and new API’s are constructed from well-established standards like XML, AJAX, PHP, REST, RSS and others. The Blue Revolution is underway.
IBM also revealed the “fast track” elements to the WebSphere Portal 6.1 portfolio. It started the year with greater attention to resources in Amazon.com’s “cloud” of Web services. But developments also encompassed enhanced rendering of WebSphere Content Management (WCM) results in the form of portlets, as well as more robust support of PHP. This month (July 2009) brings the promise of integration with Lotus Mashup, as well as enhanced resources for portal page customization. The result will be some very impressive integration of content from multiple sources (including “feeds”, blogs, social networks…) to be rendered on desktops, laptops and mobile phones.