Focusing on UC Is Dangerous for Your Business

According to Shaheen Haque, Interactive Intelligence’s regional sales manager for the Middle East, unified communications has become an excuse for vendors to lock customers in to a variety of propriety products.

Over the last 12-18 months, many vendors have jumped on the unified communications bandwagon, claiming to offer a complete solution. Like the terms artificial intelligence, client/server and Web 2.0, unified communications has become yet another phrase to be taken over by marketers to the point that it no longer has any meaning.

Imagine you’re a vendor of networking devices or applications. Your products are being commoditised by low-cost imports, or worse, free open-source equivalents. What do you do in order to differentiate? Given that up to 50 percent of your revenue comes from maintenance contracts, how do you lock in a long-term maintenance stream?

This scenario is one faced by many vendors in the industry. Their response? They voice-enable their products, call the ensemble unified communications, and tell customers they have to buy them all in order to get it.

The dangers of unified communications
It is a sad fact that many vendors’ unified communications (UC) offerings are merely a collection of multiple box solutions with a loose level of integration. This decentralised, multi-product view of UC may be capable of providing nice collaborative benefits and soft return on investment (ROI). However, what most organisations soon discover is that even these benefits can only be realised if they buy the vendor’s full range of supporting software and hardware components. Essentially, the companies end up being locked into expensive and largely proprietary hardware and software.

It is the emergence of voice over IP (VoIP) and industry standards like SIP that has driven the UC trend and given it a broader significance. Ironically, the multi-product approach to UC is working completely counter to what these standards are supposed to do. Standards enable customers to have a choice – they should be able to choose which phones they use with their applications, for example. But this is not the case with many UC solutions on the market.

UC has also become a way of dazzling customers with an array of features that lack hard ROI in order to justify higher prices on other products. If you look at a lot of the end-user interfaces being implemented for UC, most are still very much consumer-oriented – including features like ‘buddy lists’ – rather than being real business tools that encourage work to be completed in a structured way. The dirty little secret is that most UC implementations are more productivity wasters than ROI generators.

So does UC have a role to play?
Done right, UC has enormous potential, but communication must be part of a tightly integrated, centrally managed VoIP architecture, not a result of adopting multiple, decentralised products.

The first step is a single network for voice and data to allow convergence and make better use of the communication infrastructure. On top of this single network, various applications can be layered, including the IP PABX, unified communications – such as voicemail and fax in the email inbox, find me, follow me capabilities, presence management, etc. – and process automation.

In this environment, business process automation can extend from a contact centre context and be applied throughout the business. Call centre-style queuing and routing enables businesses to automate work flow for any work item, not just inbound calls or customer interactions. Presence management evolves to being more than just “which of my friends are free to chat?” to indicate the availability of employees for the assignment of real work in a business process.

Such a solution also offers complete location-independence, enabling employees to participate in business processes from anywhere in the world, and real-time supervisory monitoring goes beyond coaching agents to providing visibility into the functions that make a business tick. In short, UC in a tightly integrated, more centralised world of process automation offers significant potential for businesses and can deliver hard ROI.

As Territory Manager, Shaheen manages regional business development for Interactive Intelligence. Previously he held similar positions for IBM Tivoli/Netcool Middle East, and Micromuse Middle East.