I’ve received some comments about my article here last week about Cisco’s recent positioning shift emphasizing “collaboration” over “unified communications.”  There were questions about how the terminology wars affect UC adoption.  The immediate issues are impacts of a confused marketplace.  The broader potential impact is that enterprises delay realizing the compelling opportunities for business transformation that UC promises.

Devaluation of the Term Unified Communications

In my view, there are at least three things that the vendors have done to devalue the term “UC”:

UC Isn’t Just Voice and IM

First, UC has come to be associated with the voice and voice-substitute (e.g., IM) components of communications.  This emphasis has been especially prevalent from the legacy telephony equipment suppliers, many of whom tend to see things through a voice filter.  In my opinion, voice will increasingly be augmented by other forms of unified communications, which can offer deliver better information more rapidly or accurately. 

UC is More than UC-U

Second, much of the sales emphasis of UC seems to have circled around enhancing individuals’ personal communications, what we at UCStrategies call UC-U (for User).  There has been less discussion about UC-B, which focuses on the transformation of business processes.  UC-U is a lot easier to grasp conceptually.  Everyone gets the idea of hovering over someone’s name, checking presence, and right-clicking to launch a communications.  UC-B is harder to get one’s arms around, and in some cases can be a bit more complex to implement.  But, it’s worth the effort to understand and deploy UC-B.  We have seen that most UC-B applications return five to ten times the benefit achieved through UC-U implementations. 

Not Everything is UC

Third, in their attempts to differentiate their offerings, vendors have been sparring about definitions, although that had shown some modest signs of subsiding.  Here are just a few of the many examples.  Several years ago, Cisco rebranded all its voice communications gear “UC” whether it was focused on these new UC capabilities or it was just old PBX voice functionality in new bottles.   Avaya defined their business offerings in four pillars, but made UC different than communication enabled business processes (CEBP). 

IBM, since the early days, has spoken of UC² or UCC (Unified Communications and Collaboration), drawing a distinction between these, even though collaboration acceleration has been one of the more effective ways that UC can impact business performance.  More recently, Interactive Intelligence has been experimenting with various combinations of new three- and four-letter forgettable acronyms reflecting their spin.  And many others.

Results: Market Confusion

I just read an advance copy of a great article about this by Jim Burton.  It will appear in NoJitter this coming week.

The risk is that when there is confusion, people tend either to sit on their wallets, or to reflexively purchase tried-and-true, like-for-like functionality.  The impact is that too many enterprises will delay the realization of the compelling benefits that UC can enable by failing to grasp the impact of the industry changes that are underway.

We are in the middle of a transformation of the communications industry similar to what happened to the data processing and computing industry three to four decades ago.  These changes will fundamentally alter how communications capabilities – including collaboration among many others – will impact how business gets done.

In the future, most business communications will be software-assisted, incorporated directly into workflows or action steps, and triggered by events – very different than the discontinuous, manual step that characterizes most of today’s communications.  A rapidly growing ecosystem of developers, integrators, and other suppliers are already starting to incorporate these capabilities into a broad variety of horizontal and vertical applications.

Businesses must get ready for this coming, critical change in how communications capabilities will be developed, delivered, and used.

In a decade, we’ll look back at this dithering about labels, and just shake our heads.

[For comprehensive coverage of Unified Communications visit our Content Partner – UCStrategies.com]

[Editor’s Note: This post originally written by Don Van Doren at our partner blog UC Strategies, and is reposted with permission. –mrh]