Unified Communications - What Does That Mean?

UC is one of those vision buzz words, sort of like convergence, where the reality is not as close as those pushing the vision would like you to believe. My own employer is probably on the cutting edge when it comes to VoIP, Videoconferencing, and Data Sharing, but it is still an ad hoc process and the enabling technology of presence is still limited to manual call forwarding and out-of-office email responses.

But that's not what this is about. Zeus Kerravala, senior VP at Yankee Group, recently gave a web cast that gives as good a description of what and where UC is as any I've seen. Mr Kerravala gives his definition of UC, why it will become important, and the remaining barriers to it's widespread deployment.

He says it much better than I do, but here are some of my take-aways:

• UC is about anytime / anybody communications within the extended enterprise. By extended, he means suppliers, manufacturers, service providers, channels, and customers. These separate entities function best when they work together.


• The shift away from separate telecoms and data networks toward all IP is an enabling factor. It allows multiple heterogeneous communications products to work together seamlessly (potentially). VoIP is not the enabling technology, but most UC integrators are using VoIP as a foundation. VoIP is a step toward presence, or the ability of the system to locate users and connect to them using the available medium.


• One motivation is to increase productivity. The thesis is that if you can increase the productivity of 10000 individuals by 5%, the impact far outweighs a much larger percentage cost to IT and infrastructure.


• A lot of the pieces are here now, but the implementation is ad hoc and complex, limited to power users and techno geeks. The user must be aware of devices, transports, bandwidth, etc, and the experience is inconsistent and disappointing.