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From their inception in the mid 1990's, unified communications (UC) environments have evolved from clunky standalone voice, video, and data collaboration applications prone to blue screen and regular crashes, to highly sophisticated and tightly integrated communications and conferencing solutions. Today’s UC environments are a far cry in many respects from those of the early days. Three of the biggest differences are that:

1) they are stable,
2) they are integrated with back office elements such as corporate directories, calendars, and office productivity applications, and
3) they can interface with the most common communications medium of all: voice.

Yet, in spite of all the improvements in their voice, video, and collaboration capabilities, UC revenues and real deployments remain astonishingly low. Why is this?

This two-part article takes a critical look at the market by discussing 10 factors that are shaping the unified communications market. Part 1 will discuss the first five factors; part 2 will tackle the final 5 factors.

1) UC is a Concept, Not a Product

The marketplace abounds with "definitions" for unified communications. Some are short and some are long, but the reality is that no one can articulate a definition suitable for everyone. Consequently, in an effort to capitalize on the hype and subsequent market opportunity created around the term unified communications, there are a plethora of companies promoting UC this and UC that.

The effect has been to confuse the market. Some enterprises believe that if they buy "this thing," they will have arrived at a UC solution. Other enterprises get confused by UC and don’t buy anything. Some companies are simply ignoring UC.

Although vendor companies have products named "Unified" this or "Unified" that, and although some companies have entire divisions with unified communications in their names, their products may actually be far from unified. Our intent is not to demean any supplier that has capitalized on naming conventions; we simply point out that UC is certainly not a vendor division, product brand, or individual communications component.

The truth is that UC is in the eye of the beholder. For some companies, unifying voice messaging with email constitutes a UC solution. For others, automating emergency notification and response mechanisms is a unified communications solution. Still others want to unify their presence and IM engine with the calendar, PBX, directory, and other communications infrastructure via a common interface, and they call this a UC solution. There are companies that want to streamline a business process by adding some communications capabilities; for them, a communications-enabled business process is UC.

Unifying communications is an idea or a concept and not a product. Consequently, UC has no market size, per se: there are only communications elements that can make up a UC solution.

2) UC by the Slice

When we have gone about trying to quantify the "unified communications market," we have been forced by the reality of the situation to look at the elements that can comprise a unified communications solution and measure these individually. The truth is that people buy UC elements, not UC solutions, as has been discussed by us and others (see, for example, Melanie Turek's recent No Jitter article.

Companies don’t buy "UC systems," they buy UC components that first provide them value individually, and then if it makes sense, they unify them in some meaningful fashion. An IT manager in a large pharmaceutical said it this way: "You can’t sell unified communications...within the enterprise! ...But, you can provide voice services, audio & web conferencing, video services, etc....It is very difficult to define UC, but there is a way around it...the capabilities come first." This statement suggests that the value of the UC components must come first, followed by consideration of the value of integrating them.

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