Polycom exec Michael Frendo envisions a future in which video collaboration is as common to business users as the audio conference.
Perhaps it’s the holiday season or maybe it’s the hubbub surrounding unified communications and collaboration lately, but folks are getting nostalgic on us about VoIP. The experiences of those heady days of the early 2000s hold lessons and watch points for what’s happening in UC&C today, we’re told.
Phil Edholm, president and founder of PKE Consulting, for example, recalled Nortel’s decision to label its newly created CS1000 (which still lives on under Avaya’s care and feeding, as No Jitter blogger Andrew Prokop wrote yesterday) as an IP-PBX rather than a hybrid platform combining TDM and IP. Nortel did so to fight against Cisco, which came to market with a pure-play IP-PBX and messaging that derided the efficacy of “bolting VoIP to an existing PBX,” as Edholm wrote. Nortel’s strategy worked just fine, for a few years. The company’s decision to extend the CS1000 to a hybrid platform name caused all sorts of confusion down the road, he recounted.
