Clearing the UC Fog

Over the past few weeks, the fog around unified communications has started to clear. Vendors are making a step-by-step process to move from the abstract "Well, you've got VoIP and the IP PBX, let's throw in presence and email and the kitchen sink" pitch to honing hard-core reasons to invest in UC.

Certainly, UC in the contact center has been around for a while. CosmoCom wants to make just about everyone in the organization a contact center asset and has added mobility features so you can grab someone out of the office through their cell phone. It's a radical way of rethinking the traditional way companies have dealt with answering knowledge questions and I suspect there's going to be some social engineering involved along the way in implementing this model. Sometimes there are very good reasons why you have to go through three layers of staff before you reach the in-house guru, least of which is that the guru may not be the ideal guy you want to talking to an aggravated customer.

Business-optimized communications will be the hook to many companies, but there are two hurdles involved. The first step is going beyond the "Gee whiz" phase and putting together a trial to measure effectiveness and fine-tune the melding of business processes and UC technology. Nobody's got a straightforward ROI calculation to offer up, so a carefully constructed trial seems to be the best way to make believers out of executives. Finding the money is the second step; Nortel has indicated some companies are squeezing the hardware budget a bit to shake loose enough coin to buy software on the theory it's better to UC-enable some groups/products rather than sprinkle VoIP around everywhere without getting full benefits for the dollars spent.

We'll be spending plenty of time discussing these issues at our UC event at NXTcomm. If you have the chance, please join Dan O'Shea, Carl Ford and me on June 18 and 19 in Las Vegas.

- Doug