One of the cool things about getting into the crazy time of US electoral season is that I get to unveil my inner political wonk…

As it turns out, one of the U.S. public policy issues I don’t see addressed to my satisfaction is urban planning and mass transit options – I’m still a little astonished that very few of the US presidential candidates decided to broach this issue, and the one who talked about the benefits of light rail solutions wasn’t the candidate from New York or Chicago, but the one from New Mexico.

Anyway – as I work from home today via BroadWorks Anywhere - this seems like a good time to quote this article, with this interesting bit of wonkish prognostication:

Over the very long term, I suspect we’ll look back on the era of the 85-mile commute as a historical curiosity. That kind of distance is so enormous compared to any kind of human scaling that it just doesn’t make sense as a way to live.

This does, of course, seem to be common sense, and, uh, another pretty compelling value for home-office extensions and mobile extensions, using BroadWorks Anywhere combined with Hosted Business Solutions and BroadWorks SIP trunks.

(Insert your own ‘pants-optional’ joke here - what am I, anyway, one of those fancy sponsored bloggers?)

• Operator Branded Services.  Here the impact can be in enabling 3rd party features to be mashed up with an existing operator branded service, or as a standard within the operator to enable capabilities to be efficiently reused across operator branded services.

• Co-branded Services.  Any emerging category of services, exemplified by 3 with their X-Series, that co-brands services, e.g. Skype powered by 3.

• Long-Tail Services.  There are three important categories within the long tail.  Enabled Applications that do not necessarily have an operator brand association (e.g. 1800 services).  Endorsed application with a preferred search position and endorsement of the operator.  And the wild wild west of Internet Applications.

If I was a Service Provider, I’d be looking very very closely at the Operator Branded Services…there’s a churn-reduction impact here also that I don’t see that many people talking about.

John Furrier at BroadDev asks, I think, the right question:

Is Web 2.0 Going To Trump Unified Communications?

Are the Unified Communication’s vendors missing the Web 2.0 boat? Will the UC platforms have what users are looking for?

I think what we’re still seeing in the market is a (mistaken) impression that Unified Communications is still a PBX/Premise solution. In that mindset, people assume you buy your all-in-one UC system from a traditional PBX vendor, but it’s pretty much just a beefed up PBX with new bells and whistles and toys. And then if you follow that logic, well, of course smart guys like John are going to wrinkle their nose and note that this doesn’t really make any sense….if you’re getting all your UC solutions from one company, isn’t that really just the same walled garden problem that caused the traditional telecom equipment providers to get smacked around when they tried to offer closed IMS solutions with only their App Servers?

But - I think John’s overlooking a key point.

UC doesn’t have to be a closed premise solution. Clearly we’re seeing a move towards “Hosted Unified Communications”, where businesses are going to get their UC “in the cloud”. And just as clearly, in that model, it’s much more clear how Web 2.0 business apps and Hosted Unified Communications are really just complementary and co-existing.

Which is as good a time as any, I suppose, to plug BroadSoft Xtended, BroadSoft’s Web 2.0 APIs for application innovation and integration. Whether the market decides that the key UC app is CRM integration, Social Networking, or something else – with Hosted Unified Communications and business services in a SaaS model – you’re not making an “either UC or Web 2.0″ choice…they’re fundamentally the same thing.

- Alex Doyle