Unified communications solutions (UC) these days are a lot like lunch boxes. Companies open up the UC "box" and throw in a standard formula of sandwich (e-mail), chips (voice), dessert (IM & presence), and a drink. All the essentials are met, but nobody's come up with anything really customized or exciting, as the pieces in the box bang together. Today's trend is to throw in condiments (programmable APIs) to spice up things for a customer's individual's tastes.
Service providers and/or software vendors – and how do you tell the difference these days with many companies offering both? – need to get out of a lunch box mentality and look to the traditions of the Japanese bento box for inspiration.
A traditional bento box carefully puts together different types of food together into one box. Everything has its place and portions are designed to fit the compartments of the box. But part of the fun and allure with bento is putting everything together in the right portions and colors to arrive at something pleasing to the eye as well as to the palate.
More elaborate bento presentations go a step further, decorating food to look like characters out of cartoons or video games or decorating food to look like people, animals, buildings or flowers and plants. Customization of the bento becomes a challenge to delight the recipient.
But there are other benefits to a bento approach as well. If done properly, you get just the right amount of food in the right proportions, rather than feeling stuffed.
How does this tie back to UC? WebRTC enables a "just right" approach to UC services creation, enabling a web programmer to deliver the right balance of email, voice, video, and IM/presence services needed – or even leaving one out, if it isn't needed. Less is more, because users don't have to be burdened with things they don't need and companies don't have to pay for services they don't "eat" but get baked into the price – think of it as the celery sticks that appeared in your lunch and ended up half-eating or just simply throwing in the trash. Video is too often the celery in a UC bundle.
Customization provides the biggest win for businesses. More visually appealing, customized to task, and easy-to-use services mean companies get exactly what they want without excess "food" that they don't use. Task efficiency and productivity should increase, translating to companies getting more value for the dollar.
On the other side of the coin, VARs and resellers should be able to leverage WebRTC to generate better looking, customized UC applications far more quickly than leaning on APIs.
UC software companies sit on the edge of the coin. If they embrace customization through WebRTC, they can expand into consulting and cloud services. Failure to starting to adopt WebRTC means being left behind in a steadily declining world of lunch box offerings while the bento box approach picks up steam.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
