There's an exercise we go through every year as we start planning for Enterprise Connect (or VoiceCon, as it used to be called): We rack our brains trying to come up with a Great Debate topic that can make the rafters ring the way these debates did in the early days of Voice over IP, when Phil Edholm was leaving tire marks on the backs of various VOIP proponents, and the audience was going wild, cheering him all the way to...well, all the way to VOIP, as it turned out.
The key to any good debate is making sure that the participants actually debate. In the political world, this is no problem, because the whole reason why the participants are there in the first place is that they have differing views that they are rewarded for highlighting. But in the business world, it can be harder, since companies tend to want to avoid closing off avenues and alienating any potential partner or customer--so the tendency is to rush to the middle: "We believe in the cloud, too, we just have this subtle take on it."
The reason why our early VOIP/yes vs. VOIP/no debates worked was that Cisco could only take an unequivocal VOIP/yes position; they had no other offering in voice and no other reason to be there. And in the early days, the Avayas and Nortels that opposed Cisco in the debate had, as an overriding concern, the need to sow doubt about VOIP long enough to stall Cisco's progress, until these traditional vendors could catch up and deliver their own VOIP. So even if the traditional vendors weren't exactly against VOIP, they needed to oppose it pretty fiercely when VOIP meant Cisco and only Cisco.
So I get it, that you have to frame a debate in stark terms to make it a debate. Presumably that's why Gartner is promoting a debate it's positioning as: Is Unified Communications the Biggest Scam Since Ponzi? The Gartner analyst who's taking the Yes position, Nick Jones, outlines his argument in a blog here.
Are the vendors guilty of over-hyping UC, and trying to attach the "UC" label to absolutely everything, in hopes of making a quick buck? Damn right they are. Name me a technology in the last 20 years that they haven't bestowed similar attentions on. If you're an enterprise buyer and you can be sucked in by that level of marketing hype, you won't be around long anyway.
This was the part of the blog that irritated me:
Finally, it's not as if you could even make a decent business case for UC; people end up using bizarre logic involving the value of saving 15 minutes a day per employee. If you give people 15 minutes more time you won't get 15 minutes more work, they'll just go have a chat and another cup of coffee with a friend.
That's just lazy. Nobody talks about UC as a way to save 15 minutes, and presents that as a business case for UC--at least nobody I've ever heard in any serious forum.
What I have heard in a serious forum is Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research devoting half of a half-day tutorial at VoiceCon Orlando 2010 to building UC business cases. I've posted the slides here (PDF) so you can see for yourself what a serious consideration of UC business cases looks like. Yes, there's some discussion of time savings, but it's not about giving workers 15 extra minutes to shoot the breeze in the break room; it's about closing sales faster, resolving contact center issues faster, things that actually do matter in business.
Just because it's possible to make a business case, does that mean that business case will actually be compelling to enterprises? Maybe not, in the end. And many of Mr. Jones's criticisms of current UC implementation--the lack of SMS integration, the potential for consumer technologies like Skype to pre-empt enterprise UC--are extremely valid.
I get it--you've got to have a provocative topic for your debate. Believe me, I get it.
Can an enterprise wind up feeling scammed in the quest for UC? Sure; no less an authority than Gartner reports regularly on the number of IT, ERP, outsourcing and other projects that, in its judgment, fail to deliver value. It's an occupational hazard.
But I don't think UC itself is a scam.
