Gartner is out with its Magic Quadrant on Unifed Communications for 2010, and what struck me was the report's emphasis on multi-vendor solutions and the corresponding need for interoperability:
No vendor product adequately addresses all of an enterprise's UC needs. As a result, a best-of-breed approach remains the surest way of ensuring adequate functionality, and planners should require vendor products to be interoperable.... Enterprises should consider interoperability as an important criterion.
Overall, Gartner reports that UC deployment is increasing, but slowly. They present 3 main reasons for the relatively low adoption:
* Enterprises have large investments in communication infrastructures that must be preserved; this leads to a slower evolutionary approach, rather than to the faster revolutionary "rip and replace" approach.
* Many applications and products are complex to deploy and may require organizational changes.
* The business case frequently is based on a soft ROI or a strategic investment, such as productivity improvements, rather than on hard ROI, such as cost savings. As a result, in a conservative economy, deployments occur slower, perhaps as part of a broader technology update.
* Many applications and products are complex to deploy and may require organizational changes.
* The business case frequently is based on a soft ROI or a strategic investment, such as productivity improvements, rather than on hard ROI, such as cost savings. As a result, in a conservative economy, deployments occur slower, perhaps as part of a broader technology update.
I think that second bullet is especially worth highlighting. It's something that Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research tends to blog about here at NJ quite a bit. In looking back at Irwin's posts here at NJ, I can't say there's a single one devoted to organizational issues, but it's a theme that tends to run through whatever technology issue he's writing about--see these blogs on the iPad, virtualization, and video standards, among others.
As we've been getting ready for the Enterprise Connect Orlando 2011 program-building process, we've been thinking a lot more about the organizational issues, much along the lines of this Gartner bullet point. One of the challenges that we hear more and more about from our attendees is the blurring of the lines of responsibility among technology organizations, and the extent to which communications is now touching parts of the technology structure that it didn't used to--the datacenter, for example, or application development, or business software. This is definitely a challenge for the communications specialists going forward.
Similarly, we're expecting a major focus on interoperability at the Orlando Enterprise Connect show. The founding of the UC Interoperability Forum (UCIF) earlier this year showed the strong interest in the topic, and a recognition by vendors that their customers want solutions; however, the UCIF still lacks two of the Big Three communications vendors--only Microsoft is in, Avaya and Cisco are not. We'll delve more deeply into the challenges--and undoubtedly, the politics--of interoperability in Orlando.
Incidentally, the Information Week survey that I blogged about earlier this week confirms that enterprises do want a best-of-breed strategy for UC, with the accompanying need for multi-vendor interoperability:
