Converging out of CTIA

 

Is converged communications the new catch phrase these days? Feels like it.

More and more, companies are starting to abandon such choice acronyms as VoIP, FMC, and UC for the all-encompassing "converged" word, and with good reason. If you embrace the concept of "Voice is [just] another application," then converged communication means you can freely mix and match voice and presence and IM into everything you do. Fixed-mobile convergence and unified communications become subsets--rather than separate and distinct categories--of the converged world.

I spent last week walking the floor at CTIA and saw a lot of familiar faces from the wide world of IP communications, people I've talked to for years and years at events in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas and San Jose. Nearly all of the companies I talked to started out in the wireline world and now have healthy and growing businesses in the fast-paced wireless arena. Doesn't matter if you are managing sessions coming over copper or via an air interface, it's still being able to transcode and manage security and conduct billing on the fly. Adding WiMAX and LTE and femtocells only means there are additional challenges in moving calls onto and through the network, not a re-invention of the wheel.

If you're an applications server company, supporting FMC simply becomes a matter of adding features to your core product, according to Sylantro CEO Marco Limena. Add some software and voila! One number reachability, call logging, four digit dialing, and all the other fun features one expects out of a corporate desktop handset delivered to a mobile phone. Outgoing calls appear with the caller ID of the hosted service.

NewStep Networks started out as an FMC company, but now they've embraced "service convergence"--being able to deliver any content to any device and any place, regardless of the type. At CTIA, the company announced it now supports social networking capabilities within the CSN platform; it has a Facebook application for click-to-call and widgets for Yahoo!oneConnect and iGoogle to leverage presence, location, and behavior characteristics. Same underlying functionality used to bounce calls between mobile and wireline networks, different application.

At the edge, voice mashups are only going to accelerate the use of converged in regular conversation and the further dilution of what FMC is on any given day of the week. I think unified communications/UC will have some staying power for a bit because Microsoft is spending a bunch of money to promote the concept within the enterprise community and once the juggernaut starts rolling, it is hard to stop.

What do you think? You can reach me at doug@fiercemarkets.com.

- Doug Mohney