Unified Communications: Slowly Gaining Ground Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

New research on the adoption and deployment of unified communications suggests that most enterprises are still challenged by integrating needed applications with telephony platforms.

Nemertes Research, which just completed interviews with 117 end-user organizations averaging $10 billion in revenue, said preliminary data showed that while UC projects are moving forward, the effort is still facing hurdles within most companies.

Unified communications ties together instant messaging, e-mail, voice, and presence technology - and in some cases, audio, video, and/or Web conference capabilities.

"About 99 percent of organizations have VoIP," Irwin Lazar, Nemertes principle research analyst and program director, told InternetNews.com. "But many still don't understand what UC is about and often confuse it with unified messaging, [which is a subset]," he added.

While adoption is not moving at the speed of light, UC growth is likely welcome news to the many vendors cramming into the marketplace with full package solutions or pieces of the platform puzzle.

Those players run the gamut from the networking world with Cisco and Shortel, to desktop players like Microsoft, Lotus/IBM, and Avaya striving to gain ground. All are vying for what bodes to be a huge revenue pie given research firm IDC's prediction that the market could total $17 billion by 2011.

Not only does every vendor have a solution, but many are partnering to boost offerings for competitive advantage.

The adoption avalanche, according to Nemertes, will happen once companies understand that today's phone platform should be viewed as the UC foundation and as they figure out the business justification for funding.

According to Gartner, for successful enterprises the project involves rethinking the delivery of voice, video, data, and collaborative applications, as well as the design architectures and organizations capable of supporting them.

"Right now all the vendors are kind of making the marketplace a bit muddy as they define UC differently which is adding to the confusion," said Lazar.

Nemertes defines UC as the integration of real-time applications into communications, which, again, means having IM, voice, e-mail, voicemail, and conferencing, as well as presence/availability information technology that helps make communications efforts more efficient.

"Very few have UC as we define it up and running, but there are pilots and some even have the click-to-call feature running," said Lazar. One company even has pulled in the links between contact data files so that users can instantly find the right subject expert for call center operations, Lazar noted.

Yet the complexities in making UC work is daunting for most and many companies aren't sure whether to launch the project off the telephony system or off the desktop. Even once deployed, the issue of managing UC can be a challenge as well, noted Lazar.

"There are some tools out there but you need to pull them in as you build it out so that you're making sure performance and quality is at expectations," he said.

While it's a pretty safe bet that mobile UC won't begin to become firmly established until the technology is in play across an organization's internal operations, Nemertes' research shows that enterprises are intrigued by mobile deployment as well.

According to Lazar, there is significant interest in delivering UC to mobile workers to boost the abilities of workers using mobile devices such as BlackBerry, iPhone, or other smart phones.

Nemertes expects to complete data analysis of its UC study and complete its report later this summer.

Adapted from a story originally published on internetnews.com