Put very simply, are there advantages for the customer to open interfaces over proprietary architecture in UC?

pavila — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:56:20 GMT

I was involved in the beginning of the convergence/UC movement when it was "CTI" - when the "big deal" was that in communication we were moving from the very proprietary environment that was characteristic of the telecom world to more open architecture, which was characteristic of the data world. It seemed to me, at the time, that this could be a huge benefit for the end-user customer. No longer would they be at the mercy of a single switch vendor. As convergence and then unified communications moved forward, the customer would have the option of choosing business solutions that were developed from best of breed products rather than "you take what we have to offer". Yet, what we're seeing today is a tendency for some VoIP and UC vendors to revert back to proprietary architecture as a means of forcing customers to "buy what we have to offer or forget it". There are "reasons" put forth of course for why proprietary is better... tighter integration, quality control, etc.... but so far, I'm not convinced that proprietary is better for the customer - only for the vendor.

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Put very simply, are there advantages for the customer to open interfaces over proprietary architecture in UC?