Comments on: Unified Communications Buzz Grows

By: Massive Challenge, Massive Promise Make UC Exciting - Caller IP

Massive Challenge, Massive Promise Make UC Exciting - Caller IP — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:27:59 +0000

[...] This useful blog post at TechIQ points to several news items related to UC. The bottom line, the writer says, is that companies such as Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and others are pushing the new approach using live and Web-based events. This may be related to the difficulty in explaining UC. The news items: F5 says its network acceleration technology supports Microsoft’s main UC gambit, Office Communications Server 2007; Indiana University was the subject of a UC Webinar at Campus Technology Magazine (a replay is available here) and a UC seminar by IBM and Nortel is slated for New York City on November 14. [...]

By: Jim Burton

Jim Burton — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:05:56 +0000

The biggest challenge facing the emerging Unified Communications market is the pace of adoption, and the biggest risk is that the market is nothing more than a chaos of pilot projects, with no plans adn no metrics. Unless an enterprise creates a plan and can measure the progress and results against a baseline, UC will be seen as just another techno-surge in the IT budget. However, if the customers, with support from their consultants, create plans and demand supplier alignment with those plans, UC could deliver process improvement breakthroughs to rival those of call centers in the early 90′s and Web portals in the late 90′s. Thus, the challenge is planning for, attaining and measuring the results.