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It’s hard to think of two terms that are generating more hype than UC-Unified Communications-and Web 2.0. And while I’ve been skeptical about both, I spent last week immersed in them and, I have to tell you, I’m starting to believe.

First, let me set the stage. I began last week at the VoiceCon Tour in San Francisco, where UC was on the agenda and on the minds of the attendees. The UC session was the most crowded of the day and UC themes resonated throughout the program. You couldn’t escape UC and, believe me, none of those present wanted to.

Then, since I was already in San Francisco, I spent the next three days at the Web 2.0 Summit (http://www.web2con.com), where about 2,000 VCs, entrepreneurs, wanna-bes and groupies were wheeling and dealing, discussing and debating what Web 2.0 was or wasn’t and, most important, how they could profit from it. While startups abounded, there also were plenty of big-name companies like IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, The New York Times, Fox and NBC. In short, the Web 2.0 crowd is anything but a fringe group; it is the leadership strata of Silicon Valley, mainstream and emerging media, and software.

The Web 2.0 idea-social networking, multimedia data formats and presentation, creating communities of people with similar interests/needs-remains overwhelmingly focused on consumers rather than the enterprise. While there are important differences between the two, anyone who hasn’t noticed the extent to which the consumer market influences the enterprise hasn’t been looking. IM started as a way for kids to keep in touch with their friends, and now it’s incorporated into skills-based routing routines in modern contact centers. We bought our first iPods to listen to music, but now we also use them to tune into business and technical podcasts. You can probably think of many other examples.
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The first Web 2.0 Summit, which was held two years ago, was all about search technologies. This year, search was still important but as key foundation for new video, text and image applications. Enterprises have been moving slowly to incorporate search into ongoing operations and for valid reasons-security, compliance, etc.-but that could change over the next 12 to 24 months.

For example, IBM is already working with some of its largest customers to test how corporate databases can be linked with social networking tools like wikis and UC technologies like IM/presence, messaging and collaboration. To be sure, these initiatives are still in the early phases-a senior IT exec from American Express who presented at the Web 2.0 Summit identified security, scalability/performance and, ultimately, business value, as questions that remain to be addressed. Not surprisingly, those are the same issues that confront UC.

But it’s not far-fetched to imagine enterprise organizations evolving to reflect how people communicate, collaborate and share information when they’re outside the workplace. Teams and workgroups are key elements in enterprise DNA, and given the central role that work plays in our lives, it can be argued that the workplace is the most critical social network we have.

The Web has become an essential tool for researching products and services we need at home or in our personal lives. Why aren’t those tools appropriate for doing work-related research? We rely on Web-based social networks to help us decide what restaurant to visit and movies or plays to see. Why can’t we use corporate networks, search tools and UC to identify resources-people, white papers, reports-that can help us with work assignments?

Unified Communications can’t succeed in a vacuum; it has to be thought of and deployed in the context of overall business processes and the other communications/network technologies that are going into the enterprise. My hunch is that UC will leverage the tools and experiences associated with Web 2.0-and vice versa. UC and Web 2.0 are interesting and useful in their own right; when combined, they offer a new and compelling vision of what work and the workplace can become.

What do you think? Send your thoughts, rants, comments to me at: fknight@cmp.com.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, Business Communications Review

Posted in Applications, Fred Knight, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications |

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