No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Unified Communications Coming of Age

This piece was co-authored by Marty Parker, also of UniComm Consulting and UCStrategies.com.

Depending on when you want to start counting, UC is either 2 years old (big announcements at VoiceCon Orlando 2007), 6 years old (first Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for UC in 2003), or a decade old (earliest UC products). Whatever the number, UC is now coming of age.Customer attention has shifted from "What is UC?" to "How do we buy and implement UC?" as seen at VoiceCon and Interop, on UCStrategies.com, and in consulting and analyst engagements. It's hard to find a pure VoIP procurement--almost every RFP includes UC as the main theme or as a justifying application. The program for VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 is evolving to address this with hands-on technical content.

And, as reported last December ("The Year in Review: Part 2"), UC case studies continue to proliferate, with over 800 cases UC cases visible. An increasing number are in the CEBP category, as the vendors provide increasingly rich APIs and their systems integration partners enable communications to optimize business processes.

UC is driving vendor revenue growth across the board. While it's difficult to tell how much UC is being shipped by the IP-PBX suppliers, since most bundle their UC offers with the PBX pricing, here's what we can see:

* Mobility continues to be a major growth vector. RIM with Blackberry Enterprise Server and the new Mobile Voice System, reported annual revenue growth of 80% in their fiscal year ended Feb. 2009, "...driven by strong sales in both enterprise and consumer markets...".

* Conferencing systems appear to be doing quite well based on the major savings available from travel avoidance and business process improvement. On top of that, collaboration technologies, including both public and enterprise social networking, are the new vehicle to facilitate projects and meetings.

* Software-based UC, especially IBM Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), seem to be receiving major uptake as enterprise communications platforms, with apparent triple-digit annual growth percentages.

* Application vendors ranging from SAP and Oracle to Salesforce.com and McKesson (healthcare information systems) are embedding PC-based and mobile device-based communications controls into their application packages, often using UC vendors' APIs (above).

* Investment continues aggressively in UC Software-as-a-Service, ranging from SMB offers (CallTower, 8X8, Google, and many more) to enterprise offers (Cisco WebEx, Siemens OpenScape, Microsoft LiveMeeting and OCS 2007, IBM Sametime and Quickr, Google Enterprise, Skype, and others).

* There are plenty of UC ancillary devices and endpoints. Polycom, Plantronics, and Logitech all have major product offerings in the UC market space.

* UC Gateway providers are reporting positive uptake both for interfacing UC systems to traditional PBXs and for SIP gateways to the digital backbone carriers.

* Analysts are reporting separately on the UC market, including continued annual Gartner MQs. A recent Gartner report on cost optimization sees the greatest value coming from programs that "enable innovation and business restructuring, and implement process improvement." UC can directly contribute to these goals.

All of these are signs that UC is coming of age and showing continued growth--even in a tough economy, even though traditional PBX station line shipments are in steep decline, and even as industry consolidations continue. As you've read in the VoiceCon UC eWeekly for almost three years, UC will integrate communications tools (whether a phone, a PC or a mobile device) into the user's environment, applications, and business processes. As enterprises re-evaluate priorities for expenditures, UC projects are still making the cut because they can deliver convenience, cost savings, competiveness, and opportunities to restructure how business gets accomplished.

We hope to see you at VoiceCon San Francisco 2009, where more examples of UC moving into its maturity in the communications community will be discussed and on display.