KING CRIMSON

If you think HP CEO Carly Fiorina had trouble convincing the Hewletts and even her friends, the Packards, that merging with Compaq was a sound strategy, try figuring out her company's strategy for unified communications. “Unified communications is dead. Here's our unified communications strategy,” said Lynne Hearring, solution principal for HP Consulting, during this month's IEC IN/IP World Forum in Orlando. This presumably unintentional parody — “The king is dead. Long live the king.” — is indicative of the industry's idiosyncratic effort toward building the ultimate bundled service. Various strategies so far seem willy-nilly and halfhearted. They're born of uncertainty and need an overhaul. So when Hearring began talking about HP's Opencall software being the new platform for unified communications — even though it's supposed to be dead — it seemed little more than a valve job for an existing product. With Hearring declaring only that the phrase “unified communications” was dead and not the concept or underlying technology, the assumption seemed to be that the problems with convergence or unified communications or next-generation networks or whatever the hell else you want to call it can be solved simply with better packaging. HP says not to overwhelm the consumer with a “paradigm shift” — another self-parodic term that many speakers at IN/IP World could not escape — but to present services to them in neat little packages. Let customers decide which services are good for them and which device they want to use them on. Leave all the grand unification theory stuff to the network. Focus not on the infrastructure but on creating the ultimate voice portal. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound like such a bad strategy after all. HP is dead. Long live HP.