This repackaging has made it difficult for solution providers and customers to know what exactly is on the table. Second, this reflects and furthers a general trend towards commoditization in the UC space. How something can be commoditized without a clear agreement as to what it is is a good question, but it’s not the first time in the history of technology that this has happened.
This repackaging effort has largely been a marketing and public relations exercise. A number of PBX and network vendors, especially Cisco, have made the case that getting the benefits of UC requires switching to a VoIP system. Microsoft’s position, on the other hand, has been that what businesses really need is a combination of unified messaging and centrally-administered end-user collaboration tools in combination with a legacy PBX. Who’s right?
Of course, there are reasons a business would want either VoIP or UC. VoIP cuts long distance costs, simplifies network topology, streamlines provisioning and, in the best scenarios, simplifies IT business processes. But a number of businesses are looking to UC and, just as important, the communications-enabled business processes that UC allows, to drive workforce productivity and revenues and to improve customer responsiveness. These are two related but different problems. When vendors position it as a single problem, solved completely by their part of the solution, they pass on an enormous financial burden to their customers.
Unlike VoIP, which represents a relatively technical, paradigmatic shift in terms of how telephony is delivered, at its most basic level, UC is all about responding to the customer’s call. Unified communications solves problems in terms of customer service, responsive business processes, and employee productivity. So, UC includes key capabilities like presence (knowing who can take a call), call-flow management (letting employees route their own calls), and communications-enabled business processes (ensuring that calls are integrated with corporate data, information, business processes).
The combination of UC and CEBP is especially valuable in terms of business applications, but none of these require VoIP per se. Although SIP provides for greater integration between the telephony components and the UC components, SIP is not required to take advantage of any of the benefits above.
Of course, the prospect of providing UC and CEBP as software shifts the importance of the PBX mainly to providing reliable dial tone. Traditional PBX vendors have relied on adding UC to their newer PBX models in order to encourage customer upgrades. Budget VoIP phone system providers are taking their products upmarket by adding UC features. But both will always require the customer to invest in an entirely new PBX system to get unified communications.
Given the choice between keeping their existing PBX and buying UC as an adjunct software or buying a whole new PBX system with UC, few customers will opt for the latter. Most businesses won’t want to buy a whole new PBX system to get modest UC benefits from a PBX vendor when they can buy adjunct software from an ISV that delivers fullyfeatured UC for a fraction of the cost of a new PBX system.
The opportunity to add UC as an adjunct software product has been around for several years. Microsoft, however, has made it into a mantra and pushed aggressively to open up the PBX silo and reach in with their own product offerings, notably Office Communications Server and Exchange UM. They’ve lined up relationships with key vendors to make integrating the PBX into Windows-based products simple. An increasing number of products that allow data center software to interface with existing PBX systems has opened wide the opportunity for independent software vendors to develop applications that provide UC and communications-enabled business process capabilities for existing PBX systems.
In the end, the real winners are customers. For a customer that is happy with their existing phone system and wants to add the productivity benefits that UC provides, adjunct software products aren’t just the future, they’re the very real present.
On the other hand, for some customers, VoIP offers real advantages, notably an opportunity to bypass the expense and complexity of a convergence solution altogether. For these customers, an end-to-end solution that includes VoIP, UC and communications-enabled business processes makes sense. In both cases, customers are making their purchasing decisions using different criteria to solve different problems.
But the truth is that, today, businesses can add UC and CEBP to an existing PBX for a fraction of the cost of putting a new PBX system in place. No VoIP required! If businesses can add UC and CEBP as an adjunct to their existing PBX system, that represents a considerable cost/benefit ratio for customers and a way for solution providers to add VoIP, UC and CEBP to their customers’ data center quickly and cost-effectively. Independent software vendors that provide an end-to-end product portfolio that addresses customers’ specific problems, and their solution providers, stand the best chance in an increasingly crowded and commoditized market.
David Levy is President and CEO of Objectworld Communications.
Unified Communications Communications Magazine Table of Contents