A Key Year for Unified Communications

2008 stands to be the year that Unified Communications (UC)—the strategy for which network devices and software will work interchangeably to permit a range of enhanced business communications, from videoconferencing on the Web to tapping into consolidated contact directories—gains a sturdy toehold in the enterprise.

Irwin Lazar, principal research analyst at Nemertes Research, says that “UC allows people to integrate all the ways in which people communicate with one another, either in real time or ‘asymmetrically’—with one additional ‘smart’ layer: presence.” That’s the ability to observe in real-time whether someone you are calling, instant-messaging, or collaborating on a document with is available to communicate with you. “Unified communications is the glue that pulls everything together,” Lazar adds.

Broadly speaking, UC encompasses everything from audio conferencing to mobile solutions to collaborative applications. In order to attain UC’s full potential, businesses need to build an infrastructure that will support the integration of myriad components into a seamless environment as the UC framework evolves.

Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst of enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research, predicts that UC in 2008 (and beyond) will come closer to solving problems around the complexity of modern business communications.

UC promises “to make it easier to move from one means of communications to another,” he says. For example, today users must juggle multiple directories for instant messaging (IM), corporate and email so they can have access to all the contacts they require.

UC stands to make it easier for different categories of workers to give and take the information they need to do their jobs in the way that’s most intuitive to them or that takes their unique circumstances or locations into account. For example, consider those workers whose cell phones don’t get good reception at home, or who don’t sit in front of a computer all day, or who are on the road 48 weeks a year, or who hate sending text messages, Machowinski says. “This is about making it easier to move from one communications format to another.”

Greater device agnosticism is another potential benefit of UC, Lazar says. “Rather than finding one device and asking all users to use it, enterprises are looking at what their users are comfortable with,” he explains.

Right now, companies typically assign new employees a desktop computer, a phone and an ID badge when they come on board. Under UC, the 20-something staffer who is accustomed to using his phone to search the Web or organizing colleagues in Facebook may not have to drastically change these habits to become a fully functioning member of the corporate entity.

Lazar notes that some organizational and technical hurdles remain as small, mid-sized and large enterprises consider the implications of adopting a UC strategy.

“You have a lot of different organizations within the enterprise that exist in silos, and they are trying to figure out which group is responsible for calendaring, for voice, for IM,” he says. “You also have to figure out the value of a UC solution—a way to quantify the benefit of an implemented solution to an organization.”

Standards related to UC—primarily Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)—are enjoying increasingly wide adoption among vendors and will further pave the way for UC to move from purely conceptual to practical, according to Lazar. Even as vendors customize their own implementations of SIP and the functionality it affords, SIP is expected to provide a “lowest-common denominator” feature set for devices and applications used in a comprehensive UC strategy, he says.

Early UC adopters typically build their UC framework atop a converged voice/data network. When that is in place already, Machowinski says, costs to upgrade to UC are less burdensome than for a company that has yet to switch from traditional PBXs to IP telephony-based ones.

“As companies outgrow their PBXs and move to IP telephony, they are already partway there,” says Machowinski, who cites Microsoft’s 2007 release of Office Communications Server as an important catalyst in the pace at which UC strategies will be pursued in the months to come. “Obviously Microsoft has a huge presence on the desktop, and they offer integration with some of the major PBX vendors. I think that is going to put Microsoft in the natural position for providing desktop applications that tie in with the PBX infrastructure.”

Ultimately, as users are freed from the constraints of juggling various devices and applications and are granted a broader window into the location and availability of colleagues and business partners, UC promises near borderless communications in real time, with huge gains in productivity as a key benefit.