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September 06, 2007
Where's The Unified Communications Demand? Unified-View at ITEXPO
By Art Rosenberg
I spend a lot of time keeping up with what both technology providers and the industry pundits have to say about unified communications (UC), because they are doing all the talking. The enterprise market is responding at this stage in “The Great UC Migration” by not moving too quickly into UC implementations. This is causing UC market researchers to probe more deeply into what’s going on within enterprise organizations, but they are mostly asking IT management what’s going on with their IP  telephony plans.
The Chicken and the Egg
What IT management is planning for UC has to reflect a combination of what internal end users want to communicate easier and more efficiently and what Line of Business (LOB) management feel will pay off to the business processes that depend on faster contacts with people. Unfortunately, because the latter will often involve people outside of the organization, i.e., customers, business partners, getting everyone involved with enterprise business communications on the same train to UC will not happen easily.
That is one of the reasons that UC migration has to be selective; changing or replacing technology that still works has to be tied to ROI benefits, which are not the same for everyone in the organization. Furthermore, any changes have to be minimally disruptive for both the users who are getting the benefits, as well as everyone else who will be maintaining their status quo.
From an investment and Total Cost of Ownership perspective (TCO ), the fact that IP communications can be cost-effectively implemented on a hosted service basis suggests that selective UC migrations can be more easily implemented through such services. Since one of the main reasons given for the slow uptake of UC by the enterprise market is the slow transition to IP telephony from legacy TDM systems, facilitating such change selectively through a hosted service, would be a practical way to move forward. This would help remove the UC migration bottleneck for those enterprise business processes and associated end users that will really benefit most from UC functionality.
So, as has been frequently stated by other experts at UCStrategies.com, UC planning and implementation has to be strategically prioritized around business process communication problems, the people involved with those processes, and the relative value of those processes to the bottom line of the business. That means that LOB management and end users have to tell IT what they really need.
Join me for upcoming panel discussions about hosted IP telephony and the impact of SIP on the contact center at ITEXPO West 2007 in Los Angeles, Sept 10-12 I will be moderating two panel discussions pertaining to UC migration. One (on Sept. 10) will cover ”SIP in the Call Center,” while the other (Sept. 12) will discuss ”A Closer Look at Hosted VoIP.”
Here are the issues that will be discussed by my panelists:
- Define “SMB” market – Differences between the “S”, “M,” and “L” markets as they apply to company responsibilities and telephony/IP communications application needs.
- Economics
- End user locations
- Communication technology needs
- Decision making
- Migration considerations, interoperability with existing technologies
- Define “Hosted VoIP” as used for main topic – IP telephony, IP trunking, IP-PBX functions, integration with business applications (CEBP), integration with multimodal communications (UC), end-point device independence, etc.
- What are business drivers for hosted, vs. managed, vs. CPE? – Pros and cons
- Who will sell to small businesses? – Channels, direct, application providers, etc.
- Who will support and maintain technologies (software, hardware, networks)?
- Who are the technology suppliers to the sales channels? – Service providers, application developers, device manufacturers, etc.
- What new role will mobility play in business VoIP applications? Impact on devices and software clients, hosted applications, business vs. personal usage, use of services, etc.
- Role of service providers – challenges in the small business market, partner strategies.
What Do You Think?
Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya ( News - Alert) and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC! Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/. This discussion with the two leading enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the need for identifying individual business user requirements for UC. Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) | X | | TDM divides transmission channels into time-separated channels. TDM was designed to provide each channel with a fixed amount of bandwidth. The tutorial explains more....more |
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) | X | | SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP. SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification (emergency calling) and instant messaging.
SIP...more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) | X | | This is a case study of TCO issues. Each organization must decide for itself what values to assign to the TCO equation....more |
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X | | Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
(source: http://voipforenterprise.tmcnet.com/feature/Enterprise-transformation/articles/10404-wheres-unified-communications-demand-unified-view-itexpo.htm)
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