While working on an article this week about video conferencing interoperability, a couple of analysts mentioned that Polycom, typically thought of as a leader in this space, was struggling. It appears that this hardware-centric vendor is noticing that the enterprise is gravitating toward software-based video-conferencing offerings.

Video-conferencing rooms are being replaced with lightweight alternatives like desktop video. And why buy video hardware when other vendors are giving it away for free? Microsoft probably had this trend in mind when it acquired Skype, which users can download onto any device they wish and use it anytime, anywhere.

Smaller players are also paying attention and taking this opportunity to break in to the video conferencing market by way of partnerships with other vendors. These partnerships aimed at delivering hosted video conferencing offerings, a solution that many enterprises have begun to favor.

Vendors should keep in mind that enterprises are looking for ease of use, something that many desktop or mobile video offerings (like Skype) provide. Hosted solutions are also growing, given the low up-front investment required by a subscription service.

The good news is, the market for video only seems to be going up and Polycom has a great reputation. With a little evolution, perhaps Polycom will see its stock rise again.

In response to last week’s story about some industry changes and deciding between a single-vendor vs. multi-vendor UC strategy, Polycom CTO and co-founder Jeff Rodman (pictured left) dropped me a line with some reflections on the subject and where it fits into the push for more interoperability among UC vendors.

In addition to his perch at Polycom, Jeff is also secretary and co-founder of the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), an industry group for UC vendors dedicated to promoting better interoperability among their products. The UCIF went public in May with 17 members but has steadily grown to about 25, most recently announcing today the addition of Glowpoint, a telepresence and video conferencing managed services provider.

Jeff was gracious enough to allow me to post his comments on the blog. He’s also blogged some more about it here and also recently shared some great insight into the industry (and his musical talents) in this Q&A with independent UC consultant Dave Michels.

Polycom has been been a strong proponent of open standards and multi-vendor compatibility for a very long time (dating back to our founders’ roots in PictureTel, 1984, when we were instrumental in creating the first open standards for modern videoconferencing). Earlier this year, we recognized a growing issue with the expansion of UC, and with other industry leaders we initiated a collaboration to create UCIF, the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (www.ucif.org), to ensure that UC will work smoothly across vendors, platforms, networks, and tooltypes.

At this point, UCIF has passed a quarter-hundred members including Microsoft, Logitech/Lifesize, HP, Vidyo, Siemens and Juniper, and is focused on ensuring that UC tools work together. It’s a different strategy than creating new standards, there are plenty of those. What’s needed is consensus on how to use those standards, and a certification program so that buyers can be confident these things will work together without ripping out their existing investments, while vendors are confident that they don’t need to re-test every new release against every UC tool, release, and sibling.

One of the root issues with single-vendor approaches is that at the end of the day (or at the beginning of it?), there’s no single vendor that has all the answers. Every user has different needs; they need different combinations of tools, and they use these tools in different ways. There’s not a UC vendor out there who has every possible UC tool and lets it be used in every possible way – it sounds kind of silly to even propose this, yet that’s exactly what a single-vendor strategy is trying to achieve. I think Microsoft’s participation in UCIF really underscores this – with their extraordinary breadth and penetration, if even Microsoft thinks that UC interoperability with other vendors is crucial, then the chances that more market-specialized companies can successfully run a single-vendor play are negligible. Interop is really crucial for everyone, the big and the less big.

That continues to be Polycom’s view. We don’t try to have full UC suites, we just have the best tools for live human interaction at a distance. It’s by facilitating the incorporation of Polycom’s transparent communication into all kinds of UC solutions that we bring the best value to users, and the most positive impact on the industry. We pride ourselves in interoperability within the industry, including with our competitors, and are proud to continue our work in UC interoperability through our leadership in UCIF (in which, in full disclosure, I sit on the Board).

But with just as many (or more) enterprises being loyal Exchange users, it begged the question: Where does Microsoft stand here?

Deadlines being deadlines, unfortunately the software giant’s PR team wasn’t able to get us an interview with a Microsoft executive within our time frame, and the unsigned corporate statement came too close to press time to squeeze in.

Rather than leave everyone in the lurch, I thought I’d share the statement here:

“From an enterprise perspective, interoperability is critical in unified communications, as most customers have a heterogeneous environment and need to make systems work from various vendors of different platforms. Microsoft is committed to supporting interoperability by adopting widely accepted industry standards, such as SIP/SIMPLE, and using concepts like federation consistently across our entire platform. We publish our interfaces and platform APIs to the public enabling third parties to extend the capabilities of our solution.

Microsoft’s advantage is an integrated client experience that supports presence, instant messaging, voice and video, as well as application sharing, collaboration and conferencing. This integrated experience is delivered via products like Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010, etc., but can also through our APIs be integrated in third-party software through the extensible platform APIs of Communications Server. Using automation APIs of Communicator, click-to-communicate is easy to integrate in many applications. This extensible platform has been built with the goal to achieve business productivity at its best for our customers.

From a user perspective, we definitely see a trend of business users attempting to bring together separate pieces of data and applications into a “single pane of glass” for productivity reasons. We see these typically as non-technical business users wanting to concentrate their productivity experience within Office and within SharePoint because that is where they spend the majority of their time, bringing together data from other systems. In other scenarios, the “single pane of glass” concept is often an attempt to redefine the user experience, which may be incongruent and disconnected as a byproduct of multiple vendor clients within the environment.

For individuals who want their communication and collaboration experience to be seamless but do not have the developer skills required, SharePoint provides a set of capabilities related to “do-it-yourself mashups” that we collectively refer to as “SharePoint Composites.” And, if a business user has some technical inclination or is a developer, then they can definitely use power tools or development tools as well to create solutions that incorporate presence, communication, messaging, as well as data from other applications. You can learn more from that here.

It was convenient timing that we were planning a story on unified communications integration for Thursday just as the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum went public the day before. The two stories highlight a subtle but important difference about interoperability versus integration — one that was admittedly a bit lost on me when all the UCIF news first started to flood my inbox.

Reporters often look for (and latch onto at first sight, for better or worse) what we call a news hook. It tells readers more about why they should care about an issue. It tells them why they should care today, based on some recent event or revelation. It brings timeliness and relevancy. So when UCIF announced its formation on Wednesday, I thought it must be my lucky day. News hook falls into my lap! I even booked an interview with Polycom founder and CTO Jeff Rodman — not the usual director of product marketing spokesperson vendors offer us (no offense, directors of product marketing).

Jeff led me through an interesting 20-minute discussion on why and how UCIF was formed, and it sounds like it will serve an interesting role in unified communications (especially if, as he said they plan, the alliance is able to start stamping interoperable products as UCIF tested and approved). I asked him about what work they were doing or might plan to do to foster unified communications integration — so that we can all stop juggling/getting lost in five different UC applications. He told me it was out of scope for the alliance, but it might be something they’d consider down the line.

Oh.

Well, there goes that idea.

Hopes dashed, I asked him something we had all been wondering about when we saw the UCIF starting lineup. Something juicier. There were lots of vendors on that member list. But besides Microsoft and HP, none of the other top names we usually hear about when we think of UC, such as Avaya, Cisco, IBM — where were they? Did the UCIF tree house have a sign outside that read, ‘No other multibillion-dollar companies allowed’? ‘Leave your Lotus at the door’?

Here’s the response I got, after the jump…

“What’s happening is this is moving very quickly. We started serious hardcore recruitment two weeks ago, and companies often take a while to react. There’s often a process of deciding what it is they want to do,” Rodman said. “With large companies, you’re going to have a number of people involved, and once they decide, ‘We want to do this — oops, we have a legal process. Oops, we need to review some documents. Oops, we need to make some changes.’”

OK, so they ran into some red tape. But did they at least RSVP?

“At this point, no companies have said, ‘We don’t want to join.’ Nobody’s declined us. We are continuing to talk with the companies you’ve mentioned and other companies,” he told me. “We have many expectations that many more players will join.”

So, there you go. Hopefully you still find this week’s story still relevant, and who knows? You may finally get OCS to interoperate with your IP PBX, after all… just be sure to let me know when you integrate them.

Tandberg’s server already enables interoperability with non-telepresence Tandberg video endpoints and with Microsoft Office Communications Server. However, until now, the vast majority of immersive telepresence systems on the market have been extremely proprietary. Telepresence systems are generally unable to maintain the immersive, multi-screen, high-definition experience they are known for when a session is transmitted across vendors. In many cases telepesence systems from different vendors can’t communciate with each other at all.

The new interoperability from Tandberg claims to deliver that telepresence quality to sessions between Tandberg and Polycom products. This ineroperability will be especially important to inter-enterprise communications, enabling Tandberg customers to communicate and collaborate with Polycom customers.

There is no word on whether Tandberg will add interoperability with its other major telepresence rival, Cisco, but in this announcement the company said it will “continue to build on its successes by working to develop immersive interoperability with additional telepresence systems – both proprietary and standards-based.”