A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by VoiceCon Orlando:

Voicecon Orlando 2008—Registration Now Open!
The industry’s premier event for IP Telephony, Converged Network and Unified Communications is now accepting registrations. VoiceCon is uniquely focused on the changes reshaping enterprise communications, and is the gathering place for enterprise IT executives, technical experts, consultants, vendors and service providers who focus on that set of technologies, products and services. The conference will be held March 17-20, 2008, at the Gaylord Palms Hotel in Orlando, FL.

In last week’s issue of VoiceCon UC eWeekly, Fred Knight presented findings from an industry survey conducted by Brent Kelly from Wainhouse Research. The survey asked both customers and vendors to describe how far enterprises have come in understanding, planning for, adopting and deploying Unified Communications. One of the key conclusions is that there is a broad disparity between what the vendors are proclaiming and what customers are telling analysts.

There are many reasons for this gap: What capabilities are really included in the term “UC”? Are these trials at a few IT desks or is UC being broadly deployed throughout the company?

As Brent notes in his article, a lot of this is about perception, each of us grabbing a different part of the UC elephant. And while we may not be totally blind, our vision is conditioned by what we know from our past and by what is available to be purchased.

Here are a couple of examples. Presence—information about the communications ability and status of our friends and coworkers—is one of the cornerstones of UC. Most of us are familiar with buddy lists, so there is a common tendency to equate UC presence to IM and buddy lists. And many vendors offer such capabilities today.

But that level of functionality barely scratches the surface of what will be available. As UC moves from being a personal productivity tool to being integrated into business processes, presence will identify not just individuals, but skill sets, as we do in contact centers today. And rather than relying on pull-down menus to set status, our systems will “know” what we’re currently doing, and will automatically provide the presence server with status information. This kind of rich presence data totally changes the playing field.

I’ve had people tell me that they have UC installed, because that’s what their voice-mail vendors are now calling a particular product. As vendors start appending the “UC” label onto existing voicemail, IP-PBX or headset products, the inevitable result is marketplace confusion.

The current confusion in the marketplace is probably what leads to some of Brent’s findings—e.g., that 30% of the enterprises claim to have a UC strategy in place, or the vendors claiming that many companies already have made their UC decisions. UC purchases are undoubtedly being made, often as pilots to determine whether a bigger, broader deployment can be justified. But deciding on an IM approach or upgrading a voicemail system or buying a new IP-PBX doesn’t constitute a UC strategy. (See also Melanie Turek’s recent columns on this topic at Collaboration Loop.)

History is rife with examples of how inventions were underestimated in terms of their overall and eventual impact. The steam engine was conceived to pump water from mines, not to fuel the Industrial Revolution. The initial estimates of how much demand there’d be for electricity were based on how many gas street lamps would be replaced. Western Union ignored the arrival of the telephone. IBM’s Tom Watson thought that only a handful of computers would be sold, and DEC’s founder, Ken Olsen, didn’t believe that a market for home computers would materialize. The list goes on and on.

In each case, what was missed was how specific inventions enabled a new way of getting things done. UC will be the same; it is not a technology, a system or a product. Ultimately, it is a transformative way of thinking about how we communicate. No longer a separate, discrete step of stopping what we are doing to pick up the phone. Communications will become an integral part of virtually every application and process we encounter, and today’s subtle barriers from communications inefficiencies will largely disappear.

In the meantime, vendors will sell what they have. And enterprises will make plans based on what is currently understood to be available. But that isn’t the end of the story. We’ve barely started.

What do you think? Contact me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communication

Posted in Standards, Presence, Market Trends, Applications, Don Van Doren, Unified Communications |

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