Following these steps won't guarantee a successful deployment, but they will raise your likelihood of success.

UC is now mainstream, with nearly 60% of companies adopting it in some form, typically starting with IM and web conferencing before moving into voice integration, desktop video, mobility, and eventually, business application integration. As a result of such widespread adoption, IT managers can learn from their peers' successes, and unfortunately, failures, to help shape their own approach. In our research we gather data defining what companies are deploying, how they are deploying, and how they build business and organizational strategies to support deployment. As part of that process we ask research participants to rate the success of their implementation on a 1 (awful) to 5 (outstanding) scale, allowing us to correlate positive success ratings with specific deployment characteristics. Here now are the top ten traits of those who by their own assessment give high marks to their success.

#1: Pay attention to infrastructure: Successful firms address the network, not just the WAN but also the LAN, before starting their deployment. They look at their ability to support differentiated classes of service, establish call admission control to avoid congestion, and provide enough bandwidth to adequately support emerging applications including video. On the LAN and at the branch, they make sure that they meet requirements for line power, LAN prioritization, and redundancy. Successful firms are more likely to deploy application delivery optimization (ADO) consisting of traffic shapers, compression, and caching capabilities to effectively manage application performance. Increasingly they address the mobile world to ensure that mobile devices can support UC applications with acceptable performance and security.

#2: Standardize on SIP. Interoperability is the biggest challenge in achieving a successful UC deployment, according to 58% of IT professionals who participated in our latest benchmark. Getting various legacy and new systems to share presence information, support click-to-call or click-to-conference, and enable easy management is a difficult-to-overcome challenge. Standardizing on SIP reduces integration complexity by creating a single communications protocol layer for all UC elements.

Integrating SIP with legacy systems such as TDM or video-conferencing platforms based on the ITU H.323 protocol often requires gateways. An alternative approach melds the two islands into a single unified infrastructure, with a shared service server at the core. Examples include SIP session border controllers capable of transcoding between SIP and non-SIP protocols. For video, one may deploy a server capable of supporting both H.323 and SIP. This server functions as both a H.323 MCU, as well as a SIP proxy server, enabling architects to connect either H.323 or SIP endpoints to a single set of core controllers.

#3: Pay attention to the non-technical side: IT architects and buyers need to pay attention to the business and organizational sides of the project, as well.

* Build the organization: UC touches a lot of different areas--desktop, network, security, and server. Make sure members of all impacted teams are involved in decision-making. We've seen far too many failures because of miscommunication--the network team can't support a video installation because it wasn't aware of bandwidth demands, or the desktop team can't support software-based voice/video because it didn't design a desktop virtualization strategy with UC in mind. Also be sure to involve compliance managers to meet requirements for data retention/privacy.

* Build the business case: Prior to implementation, make sure you have buy-in from the business-unit leaders, and make sure they understand the benefit of the new technologies. Align business priorities to technical capabilities desired in the UC project. Here it's important to have liaisons that bridge IT and lines of business to establish two-way information flow.

* Define success: Before any implementation starts, define your success metrics. What are you measuring today (from technology, operations, finance, and productivity perspectives)? What will you compare those to tomorrow when the implementation is complete? You want to document success using these metrics.

* ,em>Plan the project. If multiple vendors and providers are involved in the implementation, hold initial implementation meeting to discuss timetables, interoperability, and to set expectations. One of the biggest downfalls of UC implementations is vendors not working well together because they don’t have clear direction or expectations from the customer.

#4: Leverage External Knowledge. As I noted above, the biggest challenge is integration. Don’t re-create the wheel by facing integration challenges alone; leverage the knowledge and skills of third party firms with expertise in integrating multiple systems. Remember though that Outsourcing doesn’t mean out of mind. You need a team of internal IT staff members to manage the relationship with the outsourcer. Make sure those people are adequately trained in managing such relationships. For example, make sure you: Have a clearly defined escalation procedure and document all meetings, service tickets, and support requests. Make sure your contract includes penalties for non-performance, including allowing you to terminate the contract for continued non-performance.

#5: Address management needs early on: Our research data is clear with respect to VOIP management; companies wait too long to invest in tools that give them the ability to respond to difficult problems. As a result, their implementations are more costly than anticipated, with higher levels of customer dissatisfaction. UC makes implementations more complex thanks to the need to integrate various applications, often across service provider boundaries. Ask yourself how you respond when someone lifts the receiver on their IP phone yet their presence status remains "available", or someone escalates a chat or phone call to a video session only to find the video freezes or the desktop application crashes. Management strategies should be an integral part of your architecture. Again here's another opportunity to rely on third parties who have expertise in managing cross-vendor integrated applications.

Following these steps won't guarantee a successful deployment, but they will raise your likelihood of success and save you from stepping into the pitfalls that have plagued others.