UC

Google Voice “UC” offers telecom-providers major angst

Google is now starting to admit new users to Google Voice, and the new offering is certainly a step that will give telcos worldwide some major angst. Google Voice is a free service that provides a single number, voicemail, free calling in the U.S., call screening and blocking, SMS alerts, email delivery of voicemail, rings on multiple phones, changes phones in mid-call, etc.

The new offering is surely a version of a unified communications product hosted on the Internet and it competes with nearly all of the telco advanced voice features. It also seems to signal Google’s entry into more traditional services. What the business model for this will be is very hard to say, but the offering certainly puts pressure on telcos to come up with a better (which is to say ANY) service-layer strategy.

Google’s Wave: Early assessments a bit “off”

Google’s Wave is gathering a lot of comment, but in our view, much of it is missing the key points about the notion. Part of that problem lies with Google’s own positioning of Wave, which some believe may have been rushed into public view to overhang Microsoft’s Bing announcement. We’re not so sure.

This month in our Netwatcher newsletter we’ll be taking a look at Wave, and we’re offering a short TMT Advisor Planners’ Briefing for those who registered for the service.

Wave is an architecture, not a replacement for email or even IM, as some suggest. It is the first example of a rich, federated, OTT service, and as such it could be a total game-changer for everything from unified communications and collaboration to IMS, TMF, and ITU NGN.

Does Google get all of this, or are we just being an alarmist? That’s for the future to determine. Meanwhile, we recommend everyone take a very hard look at the true details and not base their perceptions on the coverage.

Google’s Wave redefines UC market; challenges Twitter?

Google may not be saying it, but they’ve just showed their hand in (and maybe redefined) the UC market. Google Wave, announced at the Google development conference, blends social network frameworks and policies with IM and email.

We’re hearing that Google will also be integrating voice and video communications with Wave, and the fact that they made the announcement at a developer conference shows that Google is planning to pull in support from third parties to enhance Wave’s capabilities.

We’ve commented for some time that communications needed to be built around a new social network framework and not just around voice calling, and Google seems to be doing just that. Wave is a kind of smart document that carries communications along with it, facilitating its own collaborative framework. Thus, it is something like a service template and something like a business document or personal letter/email combined.

The problem is that Wave won’t be available until late 2009 at the earliest, according to the rumors we’ve heard. That means that there’s plenty of time for others to jump in and make some of the same points—and maybe faster. Based on what was said at the developer conference, it’s hard to see how Google could advance their timetable.

Hosting UC in the cloud: Not only for the enterprise

In his VoiceCon keynote, Siemens CEO O’Neill announced a deal to run Siemens OpenScape software on the Amazon EC2 cloud. The move is a very important step in our view because it illustrates that the cloud could well become a major repository for service features and create an implementation of the new service layer.

OpenScape is an enterprise server-based UC system of course, but if it can be hosted on a cloud, so could a provider-based system. The choice of EC2 is also enlightening; the Amazon model has become everyone’s darling, and we believe that it’s currently the best out there.