UC
Ever since the term unified communications entered the lexicon, debate has raged over exactly what the term “UC” means. Our early research showed a great deal of confusion. In 2007 when we first started asking IT leaders about their UC plans, roughly half told us they were implementing UC in some fashion. We thought this odd, how could a technology in its infancy see such high adoption rates? Digging deeper we found that those early adopters often defined UC as nothing more than voice and data on the same network, or had confused UC with Unified Messaging (the integration of voicemail and e-mail). Now, when we ask folks about their UC plans we first ask them for their definition of UC. Over the last two years that has usually meant “presence”, the ability to see what forms of communication (e.g. voice, video, instant messaging) are available at a given time for a given person, and what the current status of co-workers. However, even that definition of UC is becoming too restrictive. With the recent introduction of Siemens OpenScape Fusion and other competing offerings such as Avaya’s “Agile Communications Environment” (acquired from Nortel), UC is expanding to provide application developers with direct access to UC services. This concept isn’t new, the term “Communications Enabled Business Process” has been around for a few years; defining the integration of UC with other business applications. Nevertheless, new, dedicated development and integration platforms create greater opportunities for enterprises to tie their business processes directly into their UC applications, and to integrate on-premise applications with cloud-based services. These capabilities, of course, introduce new challenges as UC planning teams need to now include those responsible for managing enterprise applications, but these challenges are outweighed by the opportunity to further increase the value of UC deployments.
