Whitepaper: Unified Communications

Amongst other things, the IT industry as a whole does two things very well: perpetuating the perception of complexity, and hyping things for a brief period before dropping them and moving onto the next shiny gadget or technology.
The former is certainly true for Unified Communications (UC), yet the latter has not yet applied. If anything, UC’s momentum is building rapidly as it secures its position as ‘the’ technology to be deploying in 2010.
Deployment
So how much uptake has there been so far? If you look to the analysts and vendors, you’ll see a range of opinions on how much traction UC has gained to date. But the one that Plantronics has published stands out, as it states that 98 percent of Fortune 1000 organisations have already deployed UC.
98 percent? Its virtually brand new, how can that be? Even something as mature as mobile phones can only boast a penetration rate in the US of 76.5 percent. I was stunned by this statistic, but then it all became obvious, and this is where the complexity trait kicks in. UC isn’t new; we’ve collectively tried to make it look complex, new and shiny, because that’s what we do in IT….but it’s not. Yes, there’s some new stuff on the market, which I’ll cover later, but it also includes one of the oldest communications technologies around, the telephone.
“Sacrilege” shout some of my colleagues, but largely it’s true. Yes, there are some fantastic new products out there such as Office Communications Server from Microsoft (MSFT), that have really brought UC to the front of everybody’s minds, and the likes of Cisco (CSCO) are rapidly building on their voice and network capabilities through acquisition and integration of Webex, Postpath & Jabber, but in many ways these are just better ways of doing things that we already did.
Not a re-invention
What I mean by this is that UC isn’t inventing new ways of communicating; we’ve all been able to talk remotely to a colleague or customer for quite some time – it was 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell first plucked a steel reed to pass sound down a telephone line. Audioconferencing has been around for 20 years or so and we first saw video phones back in the 70s. Admittedly Instant Messaging is a more recent arrival onto the scene, appearing in the late 90s so it’s not all just about improvement of existing technologies.
Where UC really does come of age, however, in just how well these technologies are brought together, how easy they are to use (if you find an offering that isn’t easy to use, you must question the point of it), and how easy they transfer and translate information between various modes, i.e. between voicemail and email, between SMS and voicemail, between IM and email, and with SIP at the core of most of this integration, this will only become more streamlined.