Speaking of Standards

In our panel last month at VoiceCon titled “Challenges in Achieving the Promise of Presence“, there came a point that Jon Alperin of Avaya, sitting in the audience, nicely summarized in a tweet:

Yes, I DO want a “universal API” for presence!

You see, here’s the thing… I was sitting on stage with representatives of the providers of enterprise presence systems. There was Microsoft (with OCS), IBM (with Sametime), Cisco (with various products) and Avaya (with Aura). I was the only representative of a consumer of the presence information from those systems.

Here’s the simple case of what I want to do – I want to take our Prophecy platform and install it on the premise of an enterprise. In the real simple case, Prophecy might provide the inbound IVR for the enterprise. A call comes in, an application runs on Prophecy. At some point it is time to transfer the caller to a live person… perhaps the caller requested it, perhaps they completed a series of questions that gathered initial data. For the next step of my application running on Prophecy…

I want to route the caller to an appropriate person based on rich presence information!

I want to build my app so that I can identify who might be available, what skills they might have, etc., and then connect the caller to that person. Provides better customer service, gets customers the info they want quicker, makes happier customers… it’s a win for everyone.

And I can do this today… if I am willing to dive deep and write the app for a specific system. I could make it work with Microsoft’s OCS… or IBM’s Sametime… or Cisco’s Jabber products… or Avaya Aura… I could do this.

But here’s the issue:

I don’t want to have to write to separate APIs to consume presence from each vendor’s system!

I want ONE presence API or protocol that I can use to interoperate with ALL of the various enterprise presence providers.

Yes, we have SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP today… and we can and do support those in our platforms. And if all the aforementioned vendors completely supported those open standards, well, it would be a wonderful world…. but while the vendors do support SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP to varying degrees, it’s not clear that I can really get all the info I want and need to make the kind of routing decisions I want to do.

And that’s just the simple case… imagine that I want to use our Prophecy Hosting platform to have an app in the cloud that then interacts with an enterprise premise IP-PBX and consumes presence info from that system. How do you securely consume the premise presence in the hosted cloud?

Or what if I want to go multi-channel and fire an IM message to someone based on information provided by a caller? (Perhaps to find someone to call the person back.) In our platform, how can I consume presence information from across different modes of communication from within the enterprise?

So, yes, I want a universal API for presence that makes this all easy to do within a platform and using communication services from multiple vendors.

How about you? Do you want a universal presence API to?