This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by Unified Communication Strategies:

Unified Communication Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry.

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, but sometimes a concise headline is equally compelling: “Unified Communications-Buyers Wanted” is the title of an article appearing in the January issue of Business Communications Review…hmmmm, what point do you think the author, Brent Kelly, wants to make?

I don’t imagine anyone’s surprised to hear that buyers have yet to make any massive shift to UC. The enterprise IT market doesn’t spin on a dime, and UC is just the latest technology to confront that fundamental reality.

Consider, for example, IP Telephony. It’s everywhere, right? Well, actually no.

Of the 300 respondents to Brent’s survey, only 7 percent have implemented IP Telephony to more than 90 percent of their workforce and 11 percent have deployed it to more than half; by contrast, 36 percent have deployed it to less than 1 percent of their workforce and 28 percent have rolled it out to less than 25 percent.

Indeed, the question of what role IP Telephony should and will eventually play in UC remains an open question. At least for now, many UC applications don’t need an IP-PBX, a fact that Brent highlights in his analysis-only three out of 16 IP-PBX suppliers studied bundle UC with their IP-PBX; the vast majority sell their UC capabilities separately.

And for now, buyers seem to like having the ability to cherry-pick-50% of the respondents expect that either IBM or Microsoft will be their primary supplier of presence capabilities. What we don’t know is how many of that group expect to buy their other UC piece-parts from those two vendors, and whether IBM and Microsoft will become viewed as primary suppliers of voice and IP Telephony.

The stakes are high. Despite lots of lip service to ideas like “best-of-breed” network systems, history suggests that enterprises want only enough suppliers to keep competition alive. If UC follows the historical pattern, the vast majority of the market will be controlled by a few-somewhere around 3-dominant suppliers.

Make no mistake; while UC is many things to many people, for the vendors, particularly those coming from a PBX heritage, success in UC isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. Brent Kelly’s choice of a headline-Buyers Wanted-is, if anything an understatement

When you handicap the players, you get some intriguing results. UC will require reliability, manageability, scalability and availability, all of which play to the traditional PBX suppliers’ strengths.

But it also will plug into an enterprise IT environment that is increasingly shaped by Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures, where IBM, in particular, has the lead. And, of course, Microsoft has made UC a central focus of its strategy for enterprise communications.

All of the UC players will be discussing, debating and analyzing these issues during VoiceCon Spring 2007, and their UC products will be on display. I can’t wait to watch this drama unfold and I hope you’ll join me in Orlando.

What do you think? Write to me at here in the forum or directly fknight@cmp.com

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

Posted in Deployment, Fred Knight, Implementation, Market Trends, Unified Communications |

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