I noted a while ago that the future of enterprise communications is in social networking. It’s easy to see why this should be: e-mail has become a vast wasteland of spam and other irritations, IM is increasingly in popularity among essentially all classes of enterprise users, and there’s a fundamental requirement for file (and many other forms of) sharing within the closed-user-group paradigm. Closing the user base keeps the riff-raff and especially spam and other distractions out, and also enhances integrity and expands the range of possible functions while maintaining security and enhancing ease-of-use and productivity.

And that’s where convergence/mobile unified communications pioneer is DiVitas Networks is going with their recent announcement, which also pursues one of my favorite directions (and a natural fit and requirement for social networking of any form regardless) – Web services. There’s no software to load here, and instant support of a broad range of key handsets. Client behavior is uniform across handsets, minimizing the training and support load and maximizing flexibility. No new apps need to be developed. And a single LDAP directory can be used for all enterprise communications functions, meaning everything works the same whether at one’s desk or out and about. This is a great addition to the overall power of mobility, and builds upon DiVitas’ previous convergence and mobile unified communications capabilities.

What we need, I’ve contended for some time, is an easy-to-use, extensible, multi-modal communications service for the enterprise. The Web is the platform, wireless is the transport, and the handset is the delivery vehicle. Add a small about of software (again, via the Web), and we’re just about there. After all these years, even for those who haven’t been paying attention, mobility is finally getting interesting!

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