The buzzword du jour: presence. “Presence” is getting a lot of play, from the focus of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s opening keynote address on Tuesday to a panel discussion Wednesday.
But what the heck does it mean? Like most buzzwords, that depends on who you ask.
As Steve Granek, vice president for business development at Neustar, which divides its efforts between number portability centers and next-generation messaging, put it:
“I could ask my panel to provide their own definitions, but these four guys would give us nine answers.”
Granek’s definition: presence is the key technology for instant messaging-enabled services.
Translation (I hate that about panelists’ too-clever definitions, they often need translating):
Presence will signal others to your availability for communications and allow others to contact you in your preferred mode. But presence will likely be determined by each user, who can decide who is allowed to contact them, when, and how much info a friend or colleague can access about the user’s availability.
(That information may someday include your location, but Andrew Bud, chairman of mBlox Inc., another panelist, said that obvious privacy and civil-liberty issues must first be addressed.)
But the panel on Wednesday-“Next-generation Presence”-focused its time before a sparse audience on how presence should be implemented. Would it involve, as Granek suggested, such fundamental network technology that operators would be foolish not to think it through now and begin laying the groundwork for it?
Or, as Bud emphatically suggested, would it be better left to third parties such as mBlox, which could iron out interoperability issues and innovate more nimbly than operators ever could?
Granek said that because the notion of presence would pervade many if not most operator service offerings, eventually it would necessarily move from being an application feature to the core control layer in network software. That meant operators had no choice but to embrace it, think it through and apply it. Or lose the opportunity to third parties and lapse into dumb-pipe status.
“Presence will become key to all operator services and will be complicated by the overlap between (subscribers’) work and personal life,” Granek said.
And that meant, he said:
“There’s a natural opportunity for network operators to coordinate their presence policies,” Granek said. “Interoperability with other operators will be key.”
Jeff Armantrout, from T-Mobile USA, said he is involved in a team of operator representatives and others organized by CTIA to drive interoperability standards that leverage existing investments and technologies to speed time-to-market.
Bud, of mBlox, essentially snorted in disgust. Such a process, he implied, would take years and effectively delay the opportunity.
Not just for teens
But Armantrout declared progress and provided data to show that the notion of presence would be embraced by teens and young adults and even older adults, for different reasons. Younger subscribers simply wanted to be in touch with friends, while controlling their “status,” or availability, and define the means by which they could be reached. Older adults saw the opportunity for productivity gains-the driver for Microsoft’s notion of presence.
David Brudnicki, president of gugliGroup, which advises Fortune 100 companies on messaging technology, among other things, said he’d watched the evolution of the mobile Internet and the morphing nature and notion of presence.
“It’s gone from a siloed concept to an operator-defined idea and, now, it’s bridging ‘communities,’ ” Brudnicki said.
As a parent, he added, he was concerned about how it would be applied.
Bud, of mBlox, said that the notion had been around since the early 1990s.
“My interest is that presence not be a discrete commercial offering, but part of a suite of services that will change the industry over the next three years,” Bud said. “It should be sold not to consumers but to edge-of-network providers. There’s revenue in it for operators, if done right.”
