IP preceded and made possible true UC in the call center. You're now beginning to see things such as multi-channel call centers that allow many different ways of communicating call center agents, such as the system offered by COLLAB (www.collab.pt) that's capable of video, though most of its implementations tend to be chat and voice centers. Video usage in the call center will increase, particularly mobile, 3G, video. It'll probably happen sooner than most people expect.

Of course, what a vendor sells must correspond to the needs of users and reflect what they're buying or else the vendor won't be in business much longer. One reason interoperability among devices and UC software may be challenging is that "Unified Communications" is a clever catch phrase to describe (and market) what various vendors are up to, whether or not it has anything to do with the "real" concept of UC, which is looking every day more like a complementary extension to Fixed Mobile Communications (FMC). For example, from a call center perspective, going back to the early days of computer telephony, there's the concern of integrating call centers with existing PBXs. When you're dealing with a gigantic, distributed enterprise having dozens and even hundreds of PBXs, how do you integrate all of those PBXs with a single call center? Well, in many cases you don't. You must bypass it and use your mobile devices, perhaps in conjunction with a hosted service or hybrid. Then, with the mobiles, you can have a virtual, single PBX across a complete distributed enterprise. Tie in those mobiles to the intelligent routing of the call center, and you have 'Unified Customer Communications', a concept and term promulgated by CosmoCom. (See the Q&A, "60 Seconds with Steve Kowarsky", at the end of this issue.)

At the moment, however, much of mobile communications is "off of the radar" of many enterprises. That must change if the enterprise is to remain in control of its communications, particularly communications with their customers, which is both fundamentally and immensely critical. UC Richard "Zippy" Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC's IP Communications Group.

Unified Communications Communications Magazine Table of Contents