Feature

Open communications vs. closed communications

Open communications are key to making the inevitable multimodal, multi-supplier communication environment work, so why aren't more suppliers providing open-source systems?

By
  • Paul Holliday, global market analyst, Siemens Enterprise Communications
Published: 20 Sep 2007
It may be a heretical question. But it's one the analysts are probably asking about open communications positioning: what's wrong with closed communications?

The argument against "open" positioning goes like this. We've been living with proprietary IT systems for years. Microsoft Office is a proprietary software suite and is massively popular. SAP doesn't go out of its way to integrate with other enerprise resource planning systems. Cisco Callmanager has sold well without a hybrid product or trying too hard to accommodate its rivals. Where's the clear advantage of an open model, even in communications? It is an important challenge to answer. It's an argument that will be repeated. So the first stage of the answer is to ask what users really want from communications.

Applications must work well, and play well with others.
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Yes, users want to make lots of profit. But to support them in doing this, it's reasonable to say that users expect communications to cost-effectively knit together the organisation's many and varied processes into excellent processes. And more than this, users want communications to be flexible enough to change and grow as the organisation does.

There are two necessary conditions to achieve these two fairly simple objectives. The first is for the organisation to have "best of breed" ways of achieving the separate functions in each of its processes. The second necessary condition is for the enterprise to integrate these point functions excellently. Applications must work well, and play well with others.

Regarding the first condition, in order to have best of breed functions, the organisation needs to buy the best IT systems for a particular function. Let's use this example: the enterprise needs to buy the best word processing application.

Open communications is based on standards, increasing the likelihood of seamless integration among vendors – a core component of its appeal. So why haven't all vendors gone open source?
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In order to integrate these point applications excellently, the second requirement, the company needs to buy systems that work well together – and this is where the problem lies. Closed, proprietary point solutions don't often integrate well. Knowing this, most organisations then compromise. Instead of buying the best word processing package, they buy the best office suite: a group of software designed to work well together.

But the suite often cannot cover all functions needed by a process. At the edge of the suite, the system again needs to integrate. Even though the user has compromised on ultimate quality, it has not been able to avoid expensive customisation to join up the silos. What, then, is the benefit of initially sacrificing quality? Gartner would agree that integration is the second biggest spending priority for users after security.

Open communications is based on standards, increasing the likelihood of seamless integration among suppliers – a core component of its appeal. So why haven't all suppliers gone open source? The answer is that open-sourced, standards-based applications are function-poor: the creators make their money from adding functionality and of course charging for the integration.

The dream for users, surely, is to get an effective and well-devised functional system that is based deep-down on standards and service-oriented architecture (SOA), to make integration easy. That's not open source, and is definitely not closed, proprietary. It's open communications.

About the author:
Paul Holliday is a global market analyst for Siemens Enterprise Communications. Focused on services and solutions, he has had local responsibility for market intelligence in the UK since 2004. His consulting background includes four years in an internal services arm of the UK Post Office. Paul's blog focuses on the disruptive effects of open communications on the way businesses organise and compete.

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