Tomorrow’s full-featured unified communications offerings will combine traditional telephony features and functions with messaging, conferencing, and collaboration applications supported by both presence management and social networking tools. Presence management has slowly begun to infiltrate the enterprise communications market; social networking is currently a consumer-focused phenomenon, but will soon be ubiquitous in the workplace environment. Cisco has acquired social networking services through acquisitions, such as Five Across and the assets of Utah Street Network, for both consumer and business market ventures, and Microsoft made headlines recently when it announced it purchased a minority ownership position in Facebook, the four year old social utility currently challenging MySpace (owned by News Corporation) for leadership among social networking services providers.
One of the most important developments in the field of unified communications is the concept of federation. Federation may be a complex technological undertaking, but can be simply defined as a single view or image of data from sources originating across multiple and diverse network domains. Numerous issues, such as security, must be addressed before federated communications can be implemented and operated by enterprises as the standard for interpersonal communications across network boundaries, and though it may take many years to realize, it is an important long term objective that today’s IT community is striving for. Federated communications will replace the term unified communications in our industry jargon, like PBX replaced switchboard and IP telephony system has recently replaced PBX. It should be pointed out that federated networks and multimedia communications tools may significantly enhance remote access to people and information sharing/exchange, but will still not replace the occasional necessity for face-to-face meetings between live individuals. The competitive advantage obtained by early adopters of unified and federated communications tools will likely be short term, however, because the rest of the pack is likely to catch up sooner rather than later.
Competitive Enterprise Systems Market Landscape
Based on shipment trends the past few years there was little doubt that Cisco would whiz past Avaya to assume PBX market leadership (see Figure 4).
Cisco revenues for its Unified Communications operations were growing more than 30% year-by-year, and Avaya’s no more than 10%. Cisco now commands a substantial share of a market once dominated by Avaya’s predecessor AT&T during its monopoly days; the gap between Cisco and Avaya is the largest between the top two domestic system suppliers during the past twenty years.
It is unlikely that Cisco will relinquish its current market leadership position anytime soon, because last year it solidified its enterprise communications portfolio by adding the Unified Communications Manager Business Edition (UCMBE) targeted at the intermediate line size market segment (100 – 400 line stations), expanded its IP telephone instrument portfolio with improved models, and continues to enhance its Unified Communications Manager generic software features.
