Yesterday evening I attended a focus group on UCM (let’s just say Call Manager) and today, a roadmap session on the product. One thing that’s clear is that Cisco is moving ahead with their ideas about how customers would like to communicate and how phone systems administrators would like to manage, operate and maintain their systems.
And for the most part, they’re right. And leaving us (and others like us) in the dust.
I need to look over my notes and see what I’m allowed to write about as far as upcoming releases (NDA). The next release of CM 6.x is the one that the Cisco guys are saying is “the next 4.1.3” — in other words, the next rock-solid, stable release that customers are going to move to and sit on for a while. (Few are entering the 5.x series of the software, for a variety of good reasons.)
I believe Penn State is going to want to use this release, due in January, to make a decision: stick with Cisco and move ahead, or re-evaluate the competition? Sitting on 4.1.3 seems unwise given what’s currently out there, which is far more maintainable, feature-rich, robust… honestly, seeing what is to come but also what is available right now, I feel like I’m administering a legacy phone system with CM 4.1.3.
More to come. The exhibition floor opened up an hour ago and I’m getting ready to go down there and check it out. The show floor will be open for the rest of the conference and should provide plenty of interesting demos and information, as well as eye-candy and more swag.