This morning in a telephone conversation with James Wanless at Talkster, we got on the subject of the telecom puzzle and some things that are changing. I wasn't really thinking about enterprise telecommunications at the time, but more of individual users. But I think the comparison is becoming accurate.

In the past, telecom services were a puzzle. In many cases, the puzzle piece involved some proprietary technology. As these proprietary solutions gained traction, needs to interoperate drove the development of APIs (sometimes custom) and other tools to hook them together.

Entperprises were sometimes successful at prodding vendors to build this interoperability, or limited cross-vendor functionality, because they carry clout as large customers. Individual consumers often had to just use multiple solutions

Telecom was a puzzle. Users had to figure out what each piece looked like and whether it neede to snap into their particular puzzle picture.

Today telecom is less a puzzle and more a set of Legos. The pieces, more and more, snap together and interoperate, providing complimentary services. SIP as a standards-based protocol has gained the support that it's become part of the common framework. SIP, XMPP, XML, and the like have become an expected part of the framework.

For individuals, this means the click-to-converge approach to snapping solutions together is getting easier. every day. In a post yesterday, I said - If you build it, they will come. But they may not do what you intended when you built it. Click-to-converge technologies that give individual users the power to create their own custom solutions. We users have our own needs, which we often perceive as unique. But the bottom line is that we want to work the way we find comfortable. We don't want to change how we work just to use some incremental feature enhancement.

If there's a real mindset shift, conscious or unconscious, in the past year, it's that solution providers are starting to get that point. Companies like the ones I mentioned yesterday - iotum, GrandCentral, Talkster, TalkPlus, Abbeynet and others are creating solutions that don't just add value. These solutions compliment one another in ways that users can define if the vendors don't developed a blended solution.

On the enterprise front, we should give Microsoft some credit with the efforts in Live Communications Server too. I dont think the key to LCS success is going to be the core feature set. I think the key will be in its extensibility in working with other solutions through open standards. LCS will add more value in what it can interoperate with than it will directly. That's my instinctive feeling. I think LCS will eventually lead Microsoft to embrace open standards in ways they historically have not.

When you're talking to vendors and service/solution providers, a key delineator is whether they're offering a puzzle piece or a Lego that can snap in to your requirements. This year for Christmas, as we think about convergence and unified communications, puzzles are bad, but Legos are good.

Something to consider.


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