Much of their debate centers on a Forrester Research report on enterprise decision-makers' attitudes about a range of communications technologies, from WAN services to VOIP to UC. I've dug through the Forrester report and could easily pull out data to support either Fred's or Marty's position. So I'll leave them to battle it out and call attention to one other question from Forrester's survey of enterprise decision-makers.
Forrester asked, "How important to your organization is each of the following features of Unified Communications? (very important/somewhat important/not important/don't know)". And here are the percentage results, in the same descending order of importance as in the parenthesis from the previous sentence:
I'm not at all surprised by the position that conferencing took in the survey. Audio conferencing--i.e., getting rid of expensive conferencing services--is the killer app for VOIP/UC cost justification, and videoconferencing is surging in the enterprise. I am a little surprised by the high importance that the respondents placed on integrating all communications channels, primarily because the payback on such integration is extremely soft.
And yet, I was talking to Allan Sulkin not long ago, and Allan asked me, "When was the last time somebody said: I need a new voice mail system; I've got to go do an ROI?" It looks to me like this survey is telling us that integrated UC portals like Microsoft Communicator and Lotus Sametime are reaching the same level of acceptance, at least in the minds of IT decision makers. Which means that the UC story has been very good news for Microsoft and IBM, less so for others.
At the same time, the survey respondents seem to have a somewhat constrained--or maybe less grandiose--vision of the world than do the vendors. There's decidedly less interest in Presence, even though vendors seem to agree that Presence is the heart of UC. All you ever hear about is how you've got to know what your co-workers are up to so that you can contact them the right way on the first try.
This survey seems to suggest otherwise. The respondents clearly grasp the idea that unifying a worker's communications into a single interface will make that worker more productive. They believe that collaboration tools and integration will likewise help end users do their jobs. But fewer of them see the importance of dictating too carefully exactly how those employees collaborate.
Another thing may be that there's more resistance out there than we realize to the notion that people should be findable at all times--even if the individual gets to configure his or her own findability. Communications professionals and power users may love the idea of Presence, but maybe the same IT folks see less evidence of demand for it among their broader workforce.
In closing, I was also kind of surprised by the relatively low position given to business-feature-enabling of mobile devices. Fixed-mobile convergence clearly is a hot topic in the industry, but if it isn't so important to port business telephone features onto mobile devices, does this mean that mobility isn't as critical as we thought? Or does it mean that, for now, Blackberry email and plain-vanilla cellular voice are good enough for the mobile worker?
I'm not at all surprised by the position that conferencing took in the survey. Audio conferencing--i.e., getting rid of expensive conferencing services--is the killer app for VOIP/UC cost justification, and videoconferencing is surging in the enterprise. I am a little surprised by the high importance that the respondents placed on integrating all communications channels, primarily because the payback on such integration is extremely soft.
And yet, I was talking to Allan Sulkin not long ago, and Allan asked me, "When was the last time somebody said: I need a new voice mail system; I've got to go do an ROI?" It looks to me like this survey is telling us that integrated UC portals like Microsoft Communicator and Lotus Sametime are reaching the same level of acceptance, at least in the minds of IT decision makers. Which means that the UC story has been very good news for Microsoft and IBM, less so for others.
At the same time, the survey respondents seem to have a somewhat constrained--or maybe less grandiose--vision of the world than do the vendors. There's decidedly less interest in Presence, even though vendors seem to agree that Presence is the heart of UC. All you ever hear about is how you've got to know what your co-workers are up to so that you can contact them the right way on the first try.
This survey seems to suggest otherwise. The respondents clearly grasp the idea that unifying a worker's communications into a single interface will make that worker more productive. They believe that collaboration tools and integration will likewise help end users do their jobs. But fewer of them see the importance of dictating too carefully exactly how those employees collaborate.
Another thing may be that there's more resistance out there than we realize to the notion that people should be findable at all times--even if the individual gets to configure his or her own findability. Communications professionals and power users may love the idea of Presence, but maybe the same IT folks see less evidence of demand for it among their broader workforce.
In closing, I was also kind of surprised by the relatively low position given to business-feature-enabling of mobile devices. Fixed-mobile convergence clearly is a hot topic in the industry, but if it isn't so important to port business telephone features onto mobile devices, does this mean that mobility isn't as critical as we thought? Or does it mean that, for now, Blackberry email and plain-vanilla cellular voice are good enough for the mobile worker?
