A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:

UC 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. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail.

Talk about UC has been circulating for roughly two years, and while much has and continues to be said about the topic, precious little is actually known. That’s why an article in November issue of Business Communications Review is so important.

Our friend Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, reports on the results of an industry survey looking into how far UC has come, and what’s likely to happen next. Brent’s analysis reveals a huge gap between how UC is perceived by users vs. vendors—a gap that needs to be closed if meaningful progress is going to be made.

Brent begins his article with data describing how far enterprises have come in moving toward and/or adopting UC, and there is much that UC proponents will enjoy hearing. For example, nearly 30 percent claim to have a global UC communications and collaboration strategy in place, a number that surprised me; I didn’t expect it to be that high. And another 32 percent said that UC/collaboration were among the top three IT project initiatives within their organizations. That sounded reasonable to me, as did the almost equal number—34 percent—who admitted that they had no UC plan in place.

But while the level of activity regarding planning and strategy development was high, as Brent notes the findings “cast doubt on the comments of large vendors, who regularly tell analysts that the Fortune 500 have already developed their unified communications strategies and that these companies already have decided which vendor’s products they will buy.”

That point really struck home with me. We’ve been hearing and talking about UC for the better part of two years now, and the term has reached full buzzword status. But that’s a far cry from actually being a mainstream technology that enterprises are deploying, know how to manage, etc.

My colleague Eric Krapf and I are feeling this tension acutely right now, as we prepare the agenda and program for VoiceCon Orlando. Some of the industry experts and vendors we talk to are almost dismissive of UC, and talk about it in past tense, as a fait accompli. Others, like Brent, place us at the earliest stages of UC. Eric will be moderating a discussion on this very issue in a free VoiceCon webinar next week (“UC: Myth vs. Reality“) .

Brent’s survey also covered attitudes about specific vendors and their products. You’ll have to read the article to get the full details, but one of the key findings is that the traditional PBX vendors have a lot of ground to make up, and Microsoft has a significant lead in the battle over mindshare.

Brent’s work and similar projects are vitally important to the industry right now. We can pretend that everyone understands why UC is important and that buyers can’t wait to get the new products deployed and operational. That might make us feel better, but the joy will be short lived. The migration to UC is going to be a long-term journey; let’s acknowledge that reality and act accordingly.

What do you think? Drop me a line at fknight@cmp.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

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

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

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.