To Do List 2008, or Crystal Ball 2008 post which never happened

It’s the beginning of 2008 and of course, people love to make predictions for the year ahead (if anything to guarantee a good laughter after all). Yours truly is not an exception - this post was thought to appear under the name of Crystal Ball 2008, and it was supposed to make a number of bold (how else) predictions regarding the future of the communication technologies for upcoming year.

Thinking about it, isn’t it great to know what the future holds ( take tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers case, for instance, nice, huh?). Then the second, third, fourth and so on thought came… There are so many predictions already made - why bother and actually bore people with another one? Instead, how about a To Do List? Considering gazillion things which should or can happen to improve and further advance our ability to communicate, why not come up with the list of critical items which we should focus on, just to make our journey faster and more enjoyable? Well, here we go.

As the theory states, let’s have a list first without priorities, and then identify the most important items to work on, right? Let’s try: unified communications, metadata, content delivery technologies, interoperability, SIP, MEGACO, better quality video, better quality mobile video, IMS, FMC, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, open source, Femtocells, 700 Mhz, iPhone, VoiceXML, JSR32, presence, Skype, interoperability… Stop, didn’t I say interoperability already? Feels like this is not working. Even if I will be able to come up with the unsorted list, sorting it and talking about all the important things to do will take forever and actually will bore everyone for real… Well, let’s try a different take.

The 3 most important things to work on in 2008

Sounds better already…

• Presence
• Interoperability
• Reference Architecture for Unified Communications

Let’s look at them one by one.

Presence

Presence needs to evolve. Today, the most you can get out of it is simple status of one’s availability for chat and maybe for the audio/video call. Presence can and should provide a lot more.

• What is my geographical presence? I would like to go for a drink, are any of friends anywhere in the close proximity to join me in this nice looking bar?
• It would be nice if the recruiter simply will call me, just because my presence status said “interested in job offers”.
• I would like to be able to fully control, customize and take the advantage of presence information across all different messengers and social networks (after all, me is me, and I want to be in charge of myself).

Can this be done? Yes - and it requires presence to be defined in the form of the open standard. Can this be accomplish in 2008 - well, let’s at least start moving in the right direction, shall we?

Interoperability

There were so many things said and done, and everyone understand how important it is for the devices and networks, and interoperability still happily suffers, being limited in may cases only to the particular vendor cluster of devices (or in some especially sad cases, not even there).

Among huge variety of protocols used in today’s communications world, SIP stands out as being used the most, and with interoperability not being where it should be, so for the sake of this short post, we are focusing on SIP Interoperability.

What do we need to do in 2008?

1. Define basic interoperability profile
2. Build test cases around it
3. Run test events to make it all practical

Certification program might be far fetched but interesting endeavor. All in all, interoperability improvement is a must, or the world will be searching for a different protocol…

Reference Architecture for Unified Communications

This is somewhat of a no-brainer, as work already started in IMTC, but nevertheless, we need to make progress here. Everybody knows what Unified Communications is, right?

Well, for me today, it is voice mail coming into my e-mail mailbox. Very convenient, yes. However, really extending it in form of, for instance, adding Skype call into LiveMeeting session, or making sure that someone watching a new clip off the internet will not bring the corporate network down - we are not all the way there yet. Having such Reference Architecture should help to design and implement network in the way that Unified Communications will be really possible - now the only thing left is to work on it.

Well, hope I didn’t put anyone to sleep… Future predictions are usually exciting, and to do lists can remove a smile from anyone’s face. But I would argue that at this point it is becoming very critical to roll up the sleeves and make communications a bit more simple, smooth and pleasurable for everyone, therefore, let’s go…