Perspectives on unified communciations
More than a month ago, I set out to try to come to some sort of conclusion about the definition of "unified communications," since there is so much noise and so little agreement on what the term actually entails. I talked to vendors, carriers and analysts, and not surprisingly, I found myself just as vexed after conducting all the interviews.
It became apparent that I had set out to answer the wrong question. More important than how a company defines unified communications in a press release, actual deployments shed more light on the variety of solutions and the different business cases they fulfill.
So I got perspectives from companies doing varying things with unified communications, and collected them here together so that they could be considered against each other.
Melanie Turek, principal analyst for Frost & Sullivan covering unified communications, summed up the cause of the confusion and why attempting to define unified communications is a dead end street.
"From a high level, any time you connect two communications applications you have some sort of unified communications," Turek said. "Many vendors add that into the messaging behind products that combine any sort of communications, like Cisco, which has tried to get "unified communications" into almost all of its product line titles. When we look at the unified communications market, we tend to focus on applications that will deliver the end user a set of communications applications at a mouse click, as a broad definition."
Turek said audio and web conferencing, presence, IP telephony, and chat most commonly comprise these solutions, but also said she thinks social networking tools like wikis and blogs will emerge as the next component of unified communications systems.
While Turek said some of the noise around unified communications was overblown, she remains upbeat about the progression to this sort of IP-based communications infrastructure. "Although there is a lot of misinformation, I'm bullish on UC as the way we're going to go, but also a little more bearish on the timeline," Turek said.
The other industry players I discussed the topic with picked out different keys in unified communications deployments based on their company's positioning, their opinions and the needs of their customers.
Here are four impressions of what it takes to deliver unified communications. Each player looks at the game from a different perspective, and these are far from the only opinions out there about the utility and ultimate efficacy of unified communications. So, please feel free to share your company's take on it with me and we'll work to update this feature regularly. I hope that through analysis and consideration of positioning we can come closer to understanding what it takes to create a successful UC deployment.
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