Unified Communication and Collaboration from the User's Perspective

Debate has been raging at recent conferences, in articles, and in the blogosphere about definitions and distinctions between “unified communications” and “collaboration.” Analysts and consultants (yes, me too) put forth their opinions. Supplier companies are busy crafting messages seeking the best positioning for their products and services.

IBM believes that both are important. In fact, at the dawn of this industry, years before this current debate, the company trademarked the term UC²_™ – Unified Communications and Collaboration – to encompass both.

From the user’s perspective, all of this debate doesn’t matter much. They are just trying to get their work done faster, better, and cheaper. That’s the imperative that emerges from today’s business climate.  The key issue is this – how do these new communications and collaboration capabilities help achieve those goals?

Over the past decade there have been dramatic advances in the array of communications products and services available. Much of this has been fueled by two trends. First, voice and video communications have become just additional data streams, linked into and a part of a converged network infrastructure that takes advantage of decreasing costs and increasing capacity and capabilities. Second, the emergence of standards, applications development interfaces (APIs), and developer tools has enabled delivering communications capabilities through software and embedding them in other applications systems. The opportunities have attracted vendors from outside the traditional communications marketplace, encouraged a burgeoning ecosystem of developers, and spurred innovative thinking about how communications can best fit into the workplace.

The result has been an explosion of new functionality. One factor is a multiplication both of the number of device types that communicate and of the ways that someone can be reached. Traditional phones have been marginalized by an array of desktop and mobile devices that can browse the web, scan bar codes, play movies, and serve as information terminals as well as making a voice call. We now have many new modes of communicating and collaborating with each other – instant messages, web conferences, video calls, an array of rich presence and notification capabilities, and much, much more. 

All this functionality offers potential for adding better communications and collaboration to business processes. But it also can mean lots of complexity and confusion. Many of these communication innovations are separate, standalone capabilities, often developed by different suppliers. Too often, this just means more devices to carry, more systems to check, more interfaces to master, too many non-obvious choices, as well as a host of integration challenges. Where’s the benefit in that?

There is a compelling need to rethink how these disparate devices, systems, interfaces, and rules can be integrated and used. The opportunity is to provide a much simpler and user-friendly approach while driving innovative ways to change business processes, link communications to applications, and fundamentally improve how work gets done. 

IBM is one of the suppliers focused on making that happen. The company has a history of developing “middleware” solutions that both enable simplification of the front-end user experience and ease integration of disparate devices or systems on the back-end. Sametime, IBM’s product for delivering communication and collaboration solutions, uses this approach to accomplish both of these desirable goals. 

Sametime is a feature-rich, fully self-contained platform that supports these design objectives. An intuitive, consistent user interface enables easy navigation through a variety of different devices and allows seamlessly moving between different communication and collaboration modalities. When there is a need to integrate with systems or devices from different suppliers, the Sametime software alleviates potential complexity. For the user, this means simple and more effective use of the capabilities and information from voice, video, and data systems, desktop and mobile devices, and a range of business software applications.   

Simplicity drives adoption, and adoption drives bottom-line benefits to the enterprise. In fact, where line-of-business managers understand the “faster, better, cheaper” improvements that are possible, they demand that their IT staffs enable these tools. For IT, the frequent challenge is finding solutions that can meld well with their existing systems and infrastructure. Solutions such as Sametime that build on open standards and integrate well to a variety of other suppliers’ products can ease the challenge of responding to managers’ requests for these tools.

Whether this is “unified communications” or “collaboration,” the key point is that by simplifying the user experience while enabling access to a rich variety of capabilities, enterprises can better achieve their business goals. And in today’s environment, that’s an urgent and compelling need. 

Seeing these capabilities in action is what’s really compelling, of course. One place to learn more about these solutions will be at Lotusphere this January. I’ll certainly be there.