Vendor hype has devalued the promise of unified communications and threatens to cause confusion with the move to cloud computing. In the absence of clear and unambiguous explanations of the benefits of embarking on such projects, end users could be forgiven for thinking that these are technologies without a purpose. However, a revolution is underway, bringing with it real benefits to enterprises and to workers.
The first convergence – IP telephony
Over the last ten years, there has been a rapidly accelerating series of convergences in the communications world.
The world of telephony has changed forever… from its roots in traditional TDM voice through an initial convergence with IP networks. The TDM PBX was self-contained and comfortable – a separate network, proprietary hardware, proprietary devices, specialist communications personnel. The argument for moving to IP telephony has been focused towards reducing costs and offering new functionality by utilising data networks to carry voice traffic.
While it is true that rationalization of two separate networks into a single infrastructure has simplified the corporate network architecture, the reality has been the replacement of one set of proprietary appliances with another. Maintaining high quality voice calls over a shared data network has also provided an additional challenge. Communications application suites designed to enhance the user experience with IP telephony systems often have been no more sophisticated than similar applications used with TDM systems.
IP telephony has delivered on some of its promises but the overall benefits to the enterprise have been questionable. In many ways the status quo has been preserved, with ownership transferred from telecoms personnel to the data networking groups within the IT department. However it has transported telephony away from its isolated silo and connected it to the IT world, laying the foundation for subsequent rounds of convergence and further potential benefits to the enterprise.
The second convergence – unified communications
The concept of ‘unified communications’ is compelling… the convergence of all methods of communicating between two or more people, from any application, using any device, at any location, via the most appropriate route, enabling effective collaboration with business-grade security.
But what does it really mean? Over the last few years there has been an avalanche of vendor product announcements, hijacking and redefining the term ‘unified communications’ to reflect the feature sets of their products.
To make matters worse, there has been a singular lack of emphasis on the key message – explaining the real benefits of unified communications. Sadly, the concept has been diluted and hugely devalued in the process. Unified communications ‘products’ from different vendors often have little in common with each other, other than some degree of presence management and instant messaging.
As a reaction to this, some vendors are starting to rebrand their products as ‘collaboration’ rather than the somewhat out of favour ‘unified communications’. <more>
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