Unified Communications: Long promised technologies finally heading mainstream

Ask 10 people what "Unified Communications" means and you'll likely get 10 different responses. Although UC has been around in various forms for over 15 years, opinions vary wildly as to what it is, what it's good for, and whether or not businesses need to pay attention, much less buy in. Whatever you call it, technology analysts seem to agree that it can't be as easily defined as a PC or a mobile phone. It's much more than that."We view UC as much more of an architecture than a product," says Irwin Lazar, principal research analyst and program director at Nemertes Research. "It isn't any one piece of hardware or device. It's a capability or a competency that enables organizations to integrate various forms of communications - including voice, instant messaging, videoconferencing, and real-time collaboration - that they either have today or may consider purchasing in future."Bryan Rusche says UC is a lot simpler than you might think. "It's an integrated platform for all your communications technologies," says Rusche, Microsoft Corp's senior product manager for Unified Communications. "But it'll mean different things depending on whether you're in IT and managing it, or whether you're an end user and using it day-to-day."For the IT resource, a consolidated platform simplifies the process of provisioning new users. Longer-term, integrated management tools streamline operations as well.Rusche says if you're an end user, UC gives you a single place to go for all of your communications needs. It also lets you move seamlessly from one communication mode to another."If I receive a voicemail, but I'm not there, UC allows me to see it in my inbox and reply to that voicemail with an e-mail. Using presence awareness, that person may choose to reply with IM," he says. "As we're typing away in IM, we realize we're typing too much, that it would make more sense to just talk. So we initiate a phone call. Then we can add video and even conference in other people - also using presence awareness to identify who's available."Stefano Genoni, business development manager for Stratatech Group in Montreal, says the workflow benefits aren't limited to the company that implements the technology."You're not spending time trying to leave a voicemail at someone's office, then trying to reach him on his cell by leaving essentially the same message," says Genoni. "You're cutting that time down to one call, and with that one call you leave one voicemail that your recipient only has to check in one inbox. He's not stuck collecting two or three different messages all over the place. It makes much better use of the recipient's time as well as your own."UC also streamlines internal workflow. David Choueke, Stratatech's sales manager, says using conventional cell phones to work real-time with road warriors eats up a lot of time as different people within the organization call back and forth to check status and leave messages."Instead of getting the runaround, your mobile device now provides presence awareness," says Choueke. "Everybody else that's connected to your presence server can know instantly where you are and what you're doing. So your secretary, for example, will see immediately that you're on a call because all traffic, regardless of device, goes through the same controller. Today, if you're making a call from a standard cell phone, there's no way that your secretary or anybody else would know that."Ultimately, this capability accelerates business. "It allows us to get things done immediately," says Tom Jolly, vice president, general manager, unified communications at MTS Allstream. "It's changed the workflow of business. Something that used to be an event that often took days to resolve now just becomes a frequent task. It gets done all day long, any day, and doesn't just sit and wait."Where we're atDespite UC's history, it's taken this long to hit its stride because in many respects, it was a solution that's been largely ahead of its time. Only over the last five years or so has the cost of connectivity dropped to the point that most businesses - even smaller ones - can easily afford the fat pipes that make UC fast, flexible and robust."The technologies, service providers and developers have matured significantly in recent years," says Jolly. "They've realized the most effective way to do this is to communicate at the customer's level, to understand how their business operates then point out to them how this will drive efficiencies, impact workflow, and improve their business.""The vast majority of organizations both large and small are on the path to UC in one form or another," says Rusche. "Whether it's using mobile phones and getting e-mail on them, leveraging unified messaging to access voicemail from within a consolidated inbox, or simply a VoIP implementation, these are all steps toward UC, and companies all across Canada are at various stages of that evolution."Lazar concurs, saying his research points to an acceleration in UC takeup, with a third of companies contacted in a recent survey indicating they're moving forward with UC plans. He adds, however, that precisely what that plan is can vary wildly from company to company. The lack of a standard definition isn't the only thing that's kept UC from more widespread adoption to-date. Other limiting factors include:1. Compliance. Introducing UC brings with it information management challenges that not all organizations can easily address. For example, message archiving requirements in a unified messaging environment may not align with those used within more traditional voicemail solutions. Evolving retention-specific legislation in Canada and the U.S. only adds to the complexity - and the uncertainty.2. Privacy. Presence awareness sits at the core of most mainstream UC implementations. But the privacy implications associated with knowing when a given individual is or is not available have still not been properly addressed in the courts. Information sharing - both within an organization and between an organization and external stakeholders like clients and suppliers - is another grey area. Controlling who sees what information, and under what circumstances, remains a major sticking point.3. Cost. Integrating a broad range of applications - both existing and new - comes with significant tangible and intangible costs at all levels of the organization. Business justification for these hard and soft costs may be difficult to obtain when the business value of UC itself is not universally understood.4. Management and support. Unprecedented application interdependence results in significantly more complex troubleshooting. Is the help desk ready to tackle the call when your phone system stops sending presence awareness information to your instant messaging application? While this opens up opportunities for qualified third parties to manage these diverse application environments, the ecosystem remains immature.5. Demonstrable business case. Cost-benefit analyses are often based on known case outcomes applied to potential future scenarios. But when the infrastructure has not yet been deployed on a widespread basis, concrete cases may be difficult to find, much less cite."The challenge to more widespread adoption is not so much technical as it is organizational," says Lazar. "UC crosses a lot of boundaries and requires a lot of people who are under different management domains, yet they need to talk to each other."Unfortunately, those groups don't always have the opportunity - or the will - to work more closely together. "The telecommunications people may refuse to buy in because it doesn't save money on the phone bill," adds Lazar. "You have one group focused on the phone system, another on messaging, and they don't talk to each other. It's clear that organizations are not generally set up in quite the right way to effectively use UC."Lazar says only 10% of the companies surveyed by Nemertes had a dedicated UC planning function. This capability is critical to crossing traditional boundaries and leveraging the true benefits of integrated messaging.Organizational attitudes toward the benefits of UC are also inconsistent, adds Lazar. "Companies look at UC and like what they see. But what does a productivity increase of 10% really mean? Does it translate into additional value-added work, or does it simply give employees 10% more time to surf the Web? The lack of a demonstrable business case in this sense has been a drag on UC's growth."Focus on bottom line savingsMicrosoft's Rusche says taking that first step can be daunting. Companies new to the UC game aren't always aware of how tactical implementations can - or must - fit into longer-term planning."Whatever your starting point is, the important thing is that you make that decision strategically, with the vision towards how you're going to get to UC," he says. "So what can seem like an isolated decision about moving to VoIP isn't necessarily isolated. UC is becoming an important strategic direction for both large and small companies."Turning that direction into actionable projects demands business justification, especially within today's turbulent economic environment. Rusche says that while the soft returns of UC implementation are significant, they become a harder sell during tough times. To overcome resistance, planners need to sharpen their pencils on all related bottom line savings.For example, UC facilitates the shift to teleworking, which in turn can reduce real estate and relocation costs. Videoconferencing as an alternative to travel has long been a major UC selling point. Increasingly accessible videoconferencing capabilities are delivering advanced capability to the average worker and rendering conventional, high-overhead dedicated video facilities obsolete."It's clear we've missed a lot of individual areas where UC holds major opportunity to save money," says Rusche. "We've seen many examples of companies that have drastically reduced their travel budgets by leveraging audio video and web conferencing functionality. In one example, a provincial government cut its travel and expenditure budget in half, then used the savings to pay for further UC investments."MTS Allstream's Jolly says understanding the business need is critical to getting the most out of any technology investment."Unless you really get to the root of the way the business is operating, you're not going to see the benefit," he says. "You'll have some nifty toys. But will it save you money? Probably not."Living in the real worldGreg Patchev, IT manager, Gerrie Electric, is living the UC reality, and so far he's liking it. The Toronto-based company was dealing with a 10-year-old PBX at its head office. The equipment was so antiquated that simply bringing in someone to install a new phone or move an existing one was a difficult process because there were so few remaining people out there qualified to work on it. Even so, moving away from the familiar proved to be a challenge."It's tough moving from something you're comfortable with," says Patchev. "But it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage with the old solution. We had no backup, and we got scared. Sometimes equipment would power off, and you just didn't know if it would come back online."Every branch had a different PBX. Sharing equipment between sites was impossible - and often resulted in damaged equipment when handsets were shipped from one branch to another and plugged in. Although they looked the same, the heterogeneous back-end technologies simply were not compatible. Beyond hardware, calls from the 17 branch offices incurred significant long distance charges as well. The straw that broke the camel's back was a blown voicemail module that took a week to recover.Because Gerrie Electric was already a Microsoft shop, Patchev researched Microsoft's UC offerings - centred around Office Communication Server 2007 - and liked what he saw. The Presence Engine and LiveMeeting were particularly appealing. Flexible implementation options allowed Gerrie Electric to plan to implement these collaboration applications separately from the PBX replacement decision. This lack of vendor lock-in gave the organization the flexibility to pace its UC adoption and minimize risk.Toward a converged futureLooking ahead, it's clear that traditionally separate forms of communication - voice, e-mail, text, video, collaboration - are rapidly converging on relatively common platforms that in various forms facilitate new and creative ways of getting work done. Today's fractured communication landscape is moving toward one where a common UC platform is all that any company really needs."We're seeing less and less thinking that UC is separate from telephony," says Lazar of Nemertes Research. "Though 84% of companies we've spoken to said they see telephony as their first UC application, it's almost a universal assumption that everyone will cut their teeth on voice before adding other forms of messaging to their UC environment."Eventually, UC will become baked in - not only to the technology infrastructure, but to the organizational culture as well," adds Lazar. Three to four years down the road, you won't buy a standalone telephone system of even an IP PBX anymore. Instead, you'll buy a UC platform as a starting point. Then you'll figure out how to implement all of these features."Somewhat perversely, the current global economic turmoil may be a blessing in disguise for UC's growth prospects."IT managers are looking at UC as an opportunity to save money," says Lazar. "They're initially moving to VoIP because all telephony is essentially VoIP anyway today, but it's also saving them money. And now that they have the new infrastructure, maybe they'll take advantage of some of the new features."So they can have their cake and eat it, too. They save management and operational costs by moving to consolidated, IP-based messaging infrastructure. And they get advanced features and capabilities as a nice bonus."

Unified Communications: Long promised technologies finally heading mainstream

News | 11/28/2008 6:36 pm EST

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