By Nancy Jamison When companies use the word unique, I jump. I always want to say: prove it. This week, when NEC's Unified Solutions group announced that they had a unique communication model for helping companies unify business communications, based on a user's role, that is what I asked them to do. I also asked them how they determined that it was a unique approach. Their answer made sense to me, yet I'm not going to get up on the roof here and yell that NEC has a unique approach just yet, as I have heard other vendors talk a lot about the end user and the types of end users that are or will be using unified communications applications. Additionally, in the last year or so, there has also been a significant shift in the industry to go one step further than UC by integrating business processes across the enterprise with UC applications to unify business processes, with the newly adopted moniker of communications enabled business processes (CEBP). I will proclaim, however, that NEC has a determined focus on the approach they are taking versus several other UC encampments. Let me explain.
By Nancy Jamison
When companies use the word unique, I jump. I always want to say: prove it. This week, when NEC's Unified Solutions group announced that they had a unique communication model for helping companies unify business communications, based on a user's role, that is what I asked them to do. I also asked them how they determined that it was a unique approach. Their answer made sense to me, yet I'm not going to get up on the roof here and yell that NEC has a unique approach just yet, as I have heard other vendors talk a lot about the end user and the types of end users that are or will be using unified communications applications. Additionally, in the last year or so, there has also been a significant shift in the industry to go one step further than UC by integrating business processes across the enterprise with UC applications to unify business processes, with the newly adopted moniker of communications enabled business processes (CEBP). I will proclaim, however, that NEC has a determined focus on the approach they are taking versus several other UC encampments. Let me explain.What NEC announced in their press release was UNIVERGE360, which
enables businesses to fully integrate employee roles with automated business processes, resulting in a unified organization. NEC will combine new and existing infrastructure, applications, software, services and partnerships to deliver UNIVERGE360 to enterprise and small/medium sized business customers throughout the world.
Notice the word "roles." They explained that they believe that a shift is occurring enabled by the convergence of IT and communications, with three distinct layers that work toward a more unified enterprise. These are a unified infrastructure that includes data centers, network solutions and devices; unified communications; and unified business, which is an open, software-based environment that surrounds organizations with applications that integrate communications with critical business processes to reduce human latency and increase productivity.
The other two differentiating parts of the announcement were:
In a major shift from other approaches, NEC's UNIVERGE360 places people at the center of business communications, identifies the roles people play in an organization, and then unifies the technology and business processes needed to make employees' jobs more efficient and effective.
and
Many companies suggest that business is about the network or the desktop, but NEC believes it is actually about the individuals and empowering them to communicate in a ubiquitous manner.
In press releases, documents and analyst briefings for the last couple of years, I have heard lots of talk about the end users who are candidates for UC. Some of them have familiar names such as mobile warriors; in fact we used some of these same categories for the last decade when discussing unified messaging. I have also heard other vendors talk about the types of groups that can be forged together in a unified fashion - for example, using presence to recruit subject experts who are outside the contact center as ad hoc agents. When I asked NEC to give me an example of some of the roles they would be focusing on, they gave me a couple of examples, including the following:
As another example, a Fortune 500 enterprise has a completely different set of roles to accommodate. Let's start in the sales organization. A salesperson who works out in the field has mobility needs. This salesperson may realize she needs specific product pricing information only available in a business application she normally accesses via computer. If this is an NEC customer leveraging UNIVERGE360, the company's UC applications might be extended to the mobile device, as well as integrated with the business application to provide on-the-fly pricing on her smartphone. Using presence, she may need to conference in someone in operations to confirm shipment via an instant message or click-to-call. Meanwhile, in the customer support center, the agent can access the same business applications real-time in the UC client on his desktop without having to toggle applications and while talking on the phone with a customer. The support agent also has a need to see real-time status information of his peers in other groups and locate salespeople out in the field via rich presence capabilities.
In this example, all of these roles and the type of devices and applications that the end users would employ all have the familiar ring of scenarios mentioned by other vendors, and this is why I'm not going to scream that this approach is unique.
One thing that is unique however, is to have end-user roles as your primary focus, rather than the pipes or applications they use. From this perspective I feel that this focus will enable NEC to offer customers a cohesive design strategy for deploying UC and CEBP functions. It also serves to enable NEC to neatly bundle the concept of communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) under the same umbrella with unifying communications, rather than expressly calling it out separately. In any case, I think this approach is a very palatable alternative for customers to chew on.
Nancy Jamison is an independent market analyst. She is president of Jamison Consulting.
