This week's news on the unified messaging front from Interop has been deafening, but one major player, Cisco, has been silent. Until today. Not to be outdone by announcements about Microsoft and Foundry, Cisco looked around and found something to announce: a progress report on its partnership with Nokia. The two said today that they reached the milestone of having more than 100 customers using their joint "mobile unified communications" technology. They also said they have 600 customers in trials and 95 channel partners trained and ready to sell. Essentially, by combining Cisco technology with Nokia Eseries smartphones, cell phones can be treated like a plugged-in IP phone for shops using Cisco Unified Wireless Network wireless LAN controllers and access points.

While this isn't the kind of earth shattering new product announcement that the media and conference attendees like to gobble up, it does indicate where the UC concept really makes sense - bringing cell phones into the mix.

Other than the ability to treat cell phones like wired phones, it is hard to say if enterprises are really dying for UC. After all, for the past 20 years pundits have been predicting its predecessor, unified messaging, will take hold. When this concept first arose it was all about having one inbox for voicemail and faxes. Fast forward a couple of decades and most of us today have more inboxes than ever. We have separate voicemails for home and office landlines, plus a voicemail for our cell phone, plus multiple e-mail addresses including for home and office and garbage (gotta that spam magnet for Web forms and such). We might have additional message centers for personal blogs or Web sites that we operate. And then we have goodness-knows-how many social networks where we literally shout to each other (have to have some way to be heard above the inbox din) with links, photos, videos, private messages and public displays of widgets.

Will all this be unified? Should it be? The premise is that someone wanting to reach Chris Schmoe will know that at noon Chris is reachable via a cell phone, at 12:15 via a land line, at 12:35 via instant messaging or videocam, at 12:45 via Facebook and so on.

But why is that important? Sometimes separate choices are better. Can you imagine unified cooking? One, and only one, device that would bake, roast, broil, BBQ, fry, boil, microwave, braise and toast. Now imagine this: the power goes out and you get stuck with raw meat.  

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