At VoiceCon still today. Two more keynotes early in the day: this time IBM and Cisco. Two more variations on the themes from yesterday. The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys - how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off. With the rest, you’re always left wondering how much of what they present is real and how much is just vision and no more.

The Cisco keynote was classic Cisco - bigger and bolder than anything anyone else did, and an attempt to blow the rest out of the water. A TelePresence roundtable discussion between CMO Sue Bostrom, CEO John Chambers, Al Gore and British journalist Lawrence McGinty. I was only able to stay for half an hour but got the gist. The main thrust was climate change, so in some ways it fit nicely with Lou D’Ambrosio’s assertion that UC can save the US economy, and Pall’s suggestion that UC can transform lives and businesses. John Chambers has certainly signed up as a card-carrying member of the save the planet brigade and it looks like he’s signed Cisco up for the program too.

My conversations today confirmed several of my own thoughts. Democratization of UC is all very well as a long term project, but it’s premature at this stage as a concrete goal. Cisco and Microsoft have work to do in order to get their sales people to embrace the vision their executives articulate around collaboration and interoperability. There’s a sense that enterprises are taking a breather at the moment from pushing forward with UC while they wait to see what happens next on the vendor side. They need convincing that the solutions in the market today are mature enough to deploy, and that there is a real business case for UC, probably for individual departments or other smaller user groups in the first instance.

But the UC train rolls on, and all the major companies are planning future releases to provide more functionality, better integration and a broader set of capabilities. In time, we’ll get to first the aristocratic approach and then to democracy itself, but it’s becoming clearer and clear that all this is a long-term project.