Here's an Information Week article about how Monsanto is grappling with the issues I just wrote about.
Here's an Information Week article about how Monsanto is grappling with the issues I just wrote about.It sounds as if Monsanto is doing just what I said enterprises won't do--rolling out Communicator, the Microsoft Office Communications Server client, ubiquitously:
Within a few years--Clark won't give an exact timeline--all employees will have Office Communicator, which will act as an instant messaging client, soft phone, and gateway to Web and videoconferencing. "The vision is the ability to escalate to different levels of communication," he says, adding that the technology to do this is already in various stages of rollout, from proof of concept to pilot to production. Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) CallManager and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office Communications Server will allow Monsanto to integrate presence and click-to-call into Office apps, Outlook, SharePoint, blogs, and eventually, Monsanto's other business systems.
Note, however, that Monsanto doesn't appear to be leaping into this ubiquitous deployment rashly; just the opposite, they're in the midst of proof of concept and pilot deployments. Also note that Cisco CallManager seems to be viewed as being integral to the deployment going forward; no displacement by OCS is mentioned.
In fact, it sounds like their evolution is almost a textbook case:
Monsanto began with a progressive VoIP implementation featuring unified messaging, a migration from conventional teleconferences to the use of MeetingPlace for Web conferencing with audio, and instant messaging with Microsoft Office Communicator.
I think what this article paints is the picture that most enterprises would say is their vision of Unified Communications: Start small, do pilots, integrate it with business systems, and eventually reach a new normal in which the softphone is the ubiquitous communications portal. I'd add that the softphone is not necessarily going to reside on the PC, but could be on a smartphone or other mobile device.
Most enterprises may not have defined their goals or plotted their migration in the kind of detail we see from Monsanto--that's what Wainhouse Research found in its recent survey. But I think most will get to the point that Monsanto already seems to have reached.
