The Age of Real-Time Communication, Presence and Collaboration is Here!

Om Malik reports in his blog on the announcement of "Tello", which is a service designed to bridge the gap between various forms of communication (IM, voice, mobile) by enabling the sharing of presence information between systems. Tello is the brain child of Jeff Pulver and is backed by an all-star team of individuals including Craig McCaw and John Scully.

Using Tello, I could tell if someone was available via cell, IM, desktop telephone before I tried to call them. The vision for the product will also include integration with web conferencing technologies.

This is an important announcement, it represents a public service that aims to provide the exact same kind of function that Microsoft is building around Live Communications Server, e.g. the integration of real-time communications, presence and collaboration. I'm told that at Lotusphere today, IBM is making significant announcements that will bring the same sorts of capabilities into Sametime. I'd expect further announcements in the next few weeks as we work through the first round of major VoIP-related trade shows (see previous post).

For the last year or so I've been preaching to whoever will listen that the time when VoIP is simply part of a larger enterprise communications infrastructure that also includes IM, video, and real-time collaboration unified by presence is coming. With the Tello announcement, and others like it, that time is here.

Comments

[Art Rosenberg]

Hi Irwin,

I agree with your perspective of VoIP as the network infrastructure for all forms of communication within the enterprise, but I also see presence expanding across enterprises and across communication modalities (conferencing, messaging). In my BCR article in 2004 I discussed what end users need from IP in terms of presence, availability, and modality management for telephony services, and I think that the network service approach is really the only way to do the job. I am just wondering if the wireless carriers won't eventually jump into this technology to bridge the gap between their consumer services and their FMC enterprise offerings of the future.

Best regards,

Art Rosenberg
The Unified-View

[Aditi]

How do you build a gap between the communication basically how do this technology works?This increase the interaction with the things through this information technology and this consist of information flows it can only lead to a further compression of time and space that was characterized as an early feature of globalisation.
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Aditi
The VoIP/TDM Routes Marketplace
http://www.minutetraders.com