UC Standards Group Doesn’t Include Cisco or Avaya

“There are a lot of standards for a lot of [areas] for UC,” Rodman said. “It’s the end of the road. It’s not what you can accommodate in a mature market.”

That’s where UCIF is stepping in, Rodman said. The group wants to leverage existing standards to create more interoperability, which will help businesses expand their UC efforts and protect investments they’ve already made in communications products.

It also will be a benefit to the vendors, who currently spend a lot of money with ad hoc interoperability testing. With interoperability standards in place, testing will become less complex and less costly.

The foundation is platform-agnostic, and it is designing a certification mark that will be used by member vendors to let customers know when a product meets UCIF interoperability requirements.

The group is open to anyone and already counts about a dozen members, including Brocade Communications Systems, Broadcom, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Acme Packet and Radvision.

Where are Cisco and Avaya?

However, conspicuous by their absence are two key UC players, Cisco Systems and Avaya, both of which have been invited to join, according to Rodman. Cisco recently expanded its video-conferencing and UC power by buying Tandberg for $3.4 billion, while Avaya continues to upgrade its offering, following the purchase of Nortel’s UC business.

Bernard Aboba, a principal architect for the Microsoft Office Communications Server team, said the UCIF is open to anyone and that the group would like to have those two companies involved, but that such involvement won’t make or break the group’s efforts.

Aboba also said that as the UCIF hits its milestones, more vendors will want to join. And as the UC market grows, the importance of interoperability will increase.

“UC will be as ubiquitous as the Internet in 10, 20 years,” he said.

Cisco and Polycom have disagreed on the issue of protocols in recent months. In January, Cisco officials introduced TIP (Telepresence Interoperability Protocol), a proposed interoperability standard for video collaboration and telepresence offerings.

Cisco is hoping that other vendors sign on to the TIP push, and that eventually a standards body will take it over.

While some vendors, including LifeSize and Radvision, are joining the effort, Polycom officials said they would not, saying they are wary of protocol effort being directed by such a large vendor as Cisco. They also said that there are enough standards already in place to increase interoperability. They questioned whether the TIP effort was needed.

The UCIF is in the process of creating working groups and prioritizing interoperability scenarios that are most troublesome for customers. The organization also is developing a list of goals for the next 12 months and a longer-term interoperability road-map for the next three to five years.

More information about the group can be found here.