After the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon a runner was sent to Athens to announce the victory. After running the 25 miles and delivering the message the runner, Pheidippides, collapsed from exhaustion and died. In the Olympics the marathon is run to commemorate the memory of the victory and the runner. Through history new communication technologies may kill the messenger, but ultimately have raised the quality of life for everyone within the culture. Up until the information age information technologies have be incompatible. Which means that there needs to be human intervention to move the data from on technology media to another. Today Unified Communication (UC) technologies are changing this.
It’s about the difference between analog and digital communication. At Marathon it was an announcement passed to a human runner who passed the announcement to a city. Writing is another way to forward verbal communication through a written media and disseminated through newspapers or books. The telegraph and the telephone allowed verbal messages to be communicated even faster. The one problem we really don’t even think about is that watches, radios, television and every other analog media require human intervention to move data from one media to another.
Digital media changes this. Type a document into a digital media and the information can be converted and utilized by any other digital technology. Digital data is a series of 1’s and 0’s. While analog data varies depending on the analog technology. Think about how music is mechanically recorded and stored. Then think about how a book is written. Nobody would expect that a page from a book would ever make sounds in the same way a musical recording can. The two communication technologies are just incompatible. On the other hand music recorded digitally is a series of 1’s and 0’s are the same 1’s and 0’s that a digital document is stored. With very little effort a digital document can include music, writing and more.
Unified commutation technologies provide this type of integration between digital communication technologies. A voice mail on a cell phone is just a recording of the voice. If the recording is digitalized, then it can be sent as a transcript and an audio copy of the voicemail to an email client. In history, this conversion has never happened without human intervention. Theoretically the user would never need to check voice mail at all.
Analog communication technologies can be thought of as independent technology silos. A technology silo is a technology that is independent and incompatible with other technologies. Unified communication breaks down the barriers between these technology silos. Unified communication technologies allow a desktop PC, Laptop or even a tablet to become the focus device for all communication. The technology allows data and voice communication between computer and computer or even computer and phone. Analog phone infrastructure is replaced with a software program. Cell phones and handsets are replaced with communication devices that connect with USB ports. To the computer the data and voice are all 1’s and 0’s.
In the past a telecom company made money by selling communication infrastructure and bandwidth. In the future, telecom and hosting companies will be able to sell the same types of bandwidth but the communication infrastructure will be a server or a hosted service. The new business model for telecom companies will be to sell higher bandwidth to their customers. The same types of bandwidth that hosting provider also sell. In the future IT projects will develop systems that support this increase of bandwidth for UC providers.
This technology is still in the early stages, but there will probably be more than one Pheidippides collapsing after the technical marathon that will begin as UC technologies replace traditional analog based communication sources.