Competitive advantage generally goes to the organization best able to apply the knowledge and expertise of its workers whenever and wherever it's needed. Much has been said of how UC can accelerate and formalize internal business processes, ultimately achieving improved workflow and cost savings. Certainly the notions of presence, single number contact, video and web conferencing are no longer novel and are now increasingly taken for granted by workers. But the biggest impact in providing unified and flexible, voice, data, video, and web-based collaboration tools may occur in the wireless realm with the nearly two-thirds of all workers who comprise the ever-growing mobile workforce.

Like the hero in an ancient Greek tragedy, the strength of Unified Communications is also its weakness. The amazing ability for a user to instantly call upon any computing/ communication device situated anywhere to access corporate directories, presence information, and collaboration functions also reeks of security concerns.