The Promise of Unified Communications

An Analyst Viewpoint with IDC

Senior Research Analyst at IDC, Nora Freedman, demystifies UC adoption challenges and discusses when and why companies should make the move to UC.

BM. What do you think the promise of unified communications (UC) is for companies who are prepared to do it right?
Nora Freedman. The essence of unified communications is really about streamlining business processes that are already voice intensive, but not making them separate exercises. You want to minimize navigation between multiple applications. With UC, you’re trying to reduce time to ‘X’ – whether it be for an approval, finding out about available supplies, or locating a person or artifact.

If there was a way to do that within an ERP application or within a CRM application, then you could automatically launch those searches to make a phone call and get the right people. This is particularly relevant in emergency and alert notification scenarios, where the onus of figuring out who is the right person and where he or she might be located is embedded within the application, as opposed to leaning on your own mental directory as to who does what and where.

BM. There’s been some confusion around UC, in terms of the number of vendor offerings, different implementations, etc. How should firms clarify the decision-making process as to where to begin with UC?
NF. You have to understand that UC is more of an architecture, as opposed to a point solution. All of the major IT vendors are hoping to capitalize on the attention being paid to this market. But putting the term ‘unified communications’ or UC in front of their product names, without additional product engineering, doesn’t automatically make those products UC-enabled. 

The future direction of a company’s unified communications strategy has a lot to do with its current infrastructure, because some of the steps in the process can be leapfrogged. Certain enterprise environments – dependent on which vertical market they are in – are just not relevant in others. For example, some of the requirements and regulations in financial services are very different than, say, federal governments. So you have to understand what the security implications are, who the essential personnel to be notified are, which regulations need to be adhered to, and then what the general business culture is, because a lot of the work can be done in theory but not achieved in reality.

People can often be the biggest obstacle. Because UC is so new, there is still a limited amount of people who are trained and adept at training end-users, as well as installing and maintaining the system. There is still a lot of confusion and there are limitations on that. Enterprises will have to do their own due diligence to determine if their internal staff is skilled and equipped. If they are not, then the enterprise will have to identify which partners can help fulfill those project gaps.

The development of unified communications practices among consultants and systems integrators is very much akin to 10-15 years ago when we saw the emergence of internet and e-business practices. A lot of companies were very focused on e-business enabling, developing websites and providing web services. But now it is just a general business expectation that you’re going to have at least a website and some web services available. I think the same thing will apply here. Over the next three to five years, we’re going to see a lot of initiatives focused on what organizations are doing in terms of unified communications.

I think we’ll evolve to the point where if you can’t automatically locate people within the key business applications you’re using or be able to access certain applications through whatever device you choose, then it is going to be seen as unsatisfactory. Expectations of baseline functionality are going to be much higher, and UC is not going to be a strategy in isolation.

BM. How do organizations determine if their infrastructure is ready for UC?
NF. Their internal IT department can do the pre-deployment assessment. If they’re large enough, they can also go directly to the vendor or hire a reseller to do some of it. There are certain aspects about the infrastructure that simplify the move to UC; for example, we usually use IP telephony as a leading indicator about how prepared certain companies are. A lot of times in the preparation for IP telephony, companies have completed the network upgrades and some of the network management. They’ve done some assessment of the kind of connectivity required and the service-level agreements (SLAs) so that they will not have to worry about service degradation when the bigger applications or more comprehensive business processes are accessing multiple things, from multiple locations, across multiple geographies.

BM. Can you discuss the heightened attention on security needed as these disparate pieces of technology become part of a unified solution?
NF. The security part has to do with the fact that there are just so many more devices connecting to the network. Does your organization have device-specific authentication policies? Or can users authenticate themselves across a variety of applications and devices? Are these identities consolidated into one directory service or multiple ones?  Because there may be multiple directories within the organization, it is crucial that all user information is consistent. Otherwise, the promise of UC may be compromised.  

Government regulations may also highlight new business requirements, especially in financial services and healthcare. Due to Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, organizations must be acutely aware of who is accessing customer and patient information and must also be able to provide an audit trail. Because new UC solutions may introduce a new level of auditing exposure, some organizations have decided to disable certain features. For example, some financial organizations have disabled the voicemail capabilities of their unified messaging solutions, since they don't want these voice messages to become subject to SEC regulators and/or they lack the appropriate mechanisms to capture, archive and retrieve the voice messages to identify any policy violations.

The stories about Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and Virginia Tech highlight the need to incorporate public and federal service notifications, as well as those to employees, students and families about what’s going on. How do you effectively shut down certain parts of the campus? How do you effectively notify people, if certain types of network connectivity are not available and/or the site cannot be physically accessed?

BM. Can you talk about some of the best practices for making sure that communications are integrated with processes, workflow, applications and so forth?
NF. Some of the best UC examples or UC success stories have come from those companies that have built UC steering committees with their organizations. Traditionally, those who purchase the IT solution are rarely those who are forced to use it every day in order to complete their job.

The best-use case scenarios emerge from conversations between someone from IT, someone from the line of business, and someone from the executive level across the organization. These groups tend to welcome explorations into what the real business issues are that need to be addressed and how UC can solve them.

Consumer-based Web 2.0 applications have also increased the expectations among business users about what their organizations should provide them. For example, most of us became more adept at instant messaging from AOL and MSN Messenger, as opposed to using the Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Sametime. Only after security breaches occurred did enterprises learn about the corporate vulnerabilities exposed through the use of consumer apps into the enterprise. And thus, enterprise grade applications were deployed to displace those consumer applications. Now, many consumers are expecting the same level of usability coming from their Apple iPhones as from their enterprise devices and smartphones.

Nora Freedman is a Senior Research Analyst with IDC’s Enterprise Networking group. In this role, Freedman provides research, market analysis, and consulting services about enterprise IP telephony equipment, unified communications and telepresence.

Trusted partners

“In terms of trusted partners that people can turn to, there are obviously heavy vendor biases,” concludes Freedman. “So don’t be afraid to seek out the system integrators. Tier 1 system integrators like IBM Global Services or HP Services have well-established UC practices. These systems integrators and some other tier 2/3 resellers have been on the frontlines of making this stuff work. For those customers who are particularly wary of vendor hype and bias, trusted partners can be crucial in helping serve as a key solution advisor and/or the prime project deployment lead.”