For followers of Recombinant Communications (RC), I strongly recommend that you register for and attend the Cloud Communications Summit @ITEXPO, organized by Thomas Howe’s Light & Electric Company. It’s going to be held from 9AM til about 2:30PM on Wednesday, January 20th. As the promotional copy reads, it culminates with “a lively debate” between Don Van Doren, co-Founder and Principal, UniComm Consulting and active member of the UCStrategies Team and yours truly (Dan Miller, founder and Sr. Analyst at Opus Research).

I expect the session to be a defining moment for RC and a chance to contrast RC and UC. Simply put, I believe that the UC concept, even when parsed into UC-U (addressing the User Experience) and UC-B (addressing improvements in business processes) is too confining. Simply put, I believe that network-based services and solutions are assembled by integrators from a combination of existing resources and newly-minted code. It is the product of the age of the voice mashup, mature API’s and development environments that engage a new generation of application developers who, frankly, have never heard of UC. They aren’t unifying anything, they are combining existing Web services and telephony infrastructure in new ways to serve end user needs.

The differences between Unified Communications, Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) and Recombinant Communications had been largely semantic. Thus a lively debate had been fomenting over definition of terms. At a minimum, our discussions at the Cloud Communications Summit to show that we’re well past the days of hollow, academic discussions. A dynamic market for recombinant solutions is taking shape. It penetrates firewalls, transcends organizational silos and flattens traditional solution stacks – all with a focus on better user experience. This is a discussion that has been a long-time coming and I think everyone in attendance will gain new insights into an opportunity area that where spending will approach $40 billion (globally) in five years.

Incidentally, I’m starting the day (January 20th) at ITExpo by moderating a session called “Hosted vs. On-Premises Contact Center Solutions”. It features executives from Presence Technology, Contactual, Inc., Aspect, and Infradapt.

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