I remember attending a briefing by Frost and Sullivan in April 2006 that was called “Presence is the dial tone for next generation communication”.  At the time I thought it was promising the impossible.  They described how convergence of communication methods and devices was changing the landscape of business communications. 

Some of the products and services they described have failed.  BT Fusion was one failure, a specific mobile phone that would change from the mobile network to a landline when you were close to a BT Fusion base station.  The range of phones was small and with the pace of change with handsets it was soon out of date.  Another idea that never got off the ground was desk phones with large screens that you could use for instant messaging (IM), I don’t think I have seen a production version of this idea on a desk in a real company.

However, there have been three runaway successes.  Smart phone have take the business world by storm.  Devices that allows you to check emails, edit documents, makes phone call and IM now account for a growing proportion of the market.  The second is the inexorable rise of IM.  Since 2009 more business IMs were sent than business emails.  The other area is much more of a technical success: SIP.  Session initiation protocol has brought huge changes to telecommunications platforms over the last decade.  It is a very simple protocol for allowing different devices to talk to each other.  This means that different manufacturers’ products now have a common language.  The outcome of this is a way to share information about the status of the user with other devices.  This is what presence means to me. 

This was talked about in 2006 and was available to some very large enterprises with multimillion pound IT budgets.  I am really impressed with the speed of change as these sorts of productivity tool are now available to much smaller companies now.

With presence I can see if someone is in a meeting before I send them an urgent email or before I call them and leave a voicemail.  Instead of picking up my phone and listening to the dial tone I now look at my PC screen and see if someone is available.