Rich Tehrani on The Mobile PBX in an FMC World

Rich has a very interesting take on the Mobile PBX angle and how RIM could play into the game.

While I agree with many of his well thought out points, I think though that the current crop of products out on the market are still trying the FMC/VCC/UMA approach and that they will find rough sailing for a while if not long term.

The reason is there are just too many hurdles, and too many different vendors in the mix to make this work easily. The number of cooperative partners to make this work, and the lack of senior level integrator support is the hurdle.

IT Directors and CIOs want one stop solutions. Right now Fixed Mobile Convergence is a multi-supplier solution, not to mention multi-vendor based. While the creation of a PBX on the go is a brilliant concept, and can be fueled by the integration of API's to make some things work, the idea of FMC is one that has to happen both at the "core" and at the "edge." And so far we're not seeing anyone really embracing the ide of it end to end. This is where companies like Cisco thrive usually, but currently they don't have any real mobile strategy other than selling more hardware to the mobile operators and the companies that supply bits and bytes to the mobile world. While Unified Communications may be talked about, that's more of the unification of the back end, not at the end of the call where the user is.

I'm fully expecting to see the mobile PBX extension market to heat up and smart players in the game will have their ducks all lined up well in advance of bringing the products and solutions to market.