Regarding Blind Men and the UC Elephant

Last week I attended Enterprise Connect, a great management show that speaks to the concerns of anyone tasked with managing large legacy communication networks. At the show, I spent some time with my friend Ray Pasquale, the CEO of Unified Office. Ray has been at the heart of many solutions over the years, and his latest exploit is to stand the word “Unified” on its head. His company does not start with a history on the edge but rather with a deep understanding of how the core of the network has to be built, though unfortunately the word “Unified” has been usurped by those who are living on the edge.

At the show I caught several presentations from the major players, which caused me to remember some of the management metaphors that my bosses have used over the years. One in particular came to mind, that being the story of the blind men who were brought to an elephant and asked to describe it (for those who don’t know the story, you can get a great handle on it via Wikipedia. As the story goes, each of the men touches only one single part of the elephant before weighing in with their declarations … the stomach is like a wall, the foot is like a tree trunk, the ear is like a fan, etc.  Each man, thinking that there is nothing more to the elephant than what they themselves have been able to experience, is certain that they have a complete understanding of the beast. Thus they all fail to “see” the whole picture.

So this is why the story came to mind. I was walking around the show floor at Enterprise Connect listening to various exhibitors explain their perspective, many of whom I would say are nuanced Infocomm types who these days tend to place more emphasis on collaboration than display (which, perhaps, is why they find value at Enterprise Connect).

For the folks talking Unified Communication, though, it was as if the major players were being managed by one of the blind men. The blind man who touched the ear (or, the fan), for instance, could be Microsoft’s Lync, declaring “I already charge you a voice license, so do UC my way and you can be better integrated as to how your business runs because, after all, it’s all data.” Key to that pitch, of course, is buying into ear/fan/software being the most important piece. Of course, they do the other pieces – mostly through partners – but believe that in the end the core should be the software.

(Irwin Lazar offers a nice discussion on Microsoft’s fan club HERE.)

Next there is Avaya, who for the sake of this discussion is the man who touched the foot. Keeping the business moving with deliberate steps, the tree trunk seems stationary even though it is actually moving. They want you to know that it has always been about turning and that Avaya understood this before others even heard of Erlang, etc. As such, the right place to center your attention is on the trunking side of the business, though you can be certain that they can also support your stomach and ear.

Finally, there is Cisco, which showed the most girth at Enterprise Connect, so much so that their booth looked like a trading floor. Pointing to their wall of customers and support, Cisco suggests that the focus should be at the heart of your metabolism, that everything routes through the center and that all of the other parts of the elephant are just peripheral (though, rest assured, they are prepared to take care of the periphery for you, too).

So now not only do the men never get the whole picture, they are employed by the UC companies and cannot even prey (intentionally punny) the same way!

To be clear, many of the other companies at the show were emphasizing still other pieces of the elephant, but a few – one being Unified Office – were focused not on what communication is today, but on what it will be in the future.

I often think I have a tough time herding cats at my own show, which is why I am so impressed at the ability of Enterprise Connect to herd the elephants. None of the players wanted to touch in exactly the same spot and all of them turned a blind eye to mobile. WebRTC helps, but it is just a piece of the solution. MDM also helps, but only in how it looks at the BYOD world as a problem to solve. And as for WebRTC, I believe it has a chance to get the mix right, but I will write about that in some other place at some other time.