The discussion at Acme Packet’s (News - Alert) University event today in Boston on Harvard’s campus spanned enormous developments in IP communications, and geared towards changes in the enterprise during the afternoon’s session titled, “Enterprise IP Communications: Trends and Challenges” with Zeus Kerravala (News - Alert), speaking from ZK Research.

Kerravala cut right to the chase and told the audience, “The nature of work is changing.” He highlighted some important points that businesses need to face including the need to leverage the knowledge of employees globally, organization-to-organization collaboration, and supporting an increasingly dynamic and mobile workforce.

Enterprises must face the facts, if they haven’t already: The workforce is increasingly mobile. Tablets have reached 11 percent penetration of the workforce. Kerravala listed a few more interesting stats on the mobile front: “45 percent of workers are currently mobile workers, 68 percent of business smart phones are procured by the worker, and 42 percent of workers consider a smartphone or tablet their primary computing device.” Ultimately, unified communications can help meet the current business challenges with the latest developments in IP communications.

Noting that basic UC is well deployed, Kerravala revealed that 43 percent of organizations surveyed in his research were found to be using basic UC deployment, 20 percent use advanced UC deployment, and only 5 percent use full UC deployment across their organizations.

Current drivers of UC include the need to make decisions more quickly – resulting in a more competitive position in an enterprise’s respective space. Kerravala noted that VoIP’s maturity contributes to the drive towards UC as well; VoIP systems aren’t hybrid anymore, they’re pure platforms.

He heavily emphasized the integration of video and it’s pushing of the enterprise to incorporating UC.

The question becomes, “Can organizations rebuild processes with video inserted into them? If you can wrap video into a process, then it changes the way that process is done,” he commented. If an enterprise can find a way to change the communications process instead of just throwing upgrades on someone’s desk, the evolution towards UC will be much more effective.

So how does SIP trunking play into all of these considerations? SIP trunking saves money. Kerravala noted that it allows companies to replace physical PSTN trunks with ‘virtual’ trunks that are deployed over a data connection, which can be a dedicated line, shared connection, an Internet connection or a burstable one.

Also, you can get better uptime and better quality with faster deployment of VoIP and UC. The incorporation of SIP trunking also enables improved disaster recovery and business continuity.

So with all these great benefits, why don’t more people use unified communications? Current UC barriers including the up-front cost, lack of internal skills, interoperability issues, and the fact that it’s difficult to calculate ROI are all likely contributors, Karravala told us. But the benefits are clearly apparent, and will be requirements before all too long.