A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies, originally posted June 28, 2007
The Enterprise 2.0 conference held in Boston last week explored how emerging social networking tools will transform the way business is conducted in the future. Amidst the flurry of blogs, wikis, folksonomies (think, taxonomy by the people), mashups and more, several sessions focused on UC and its role in this brave new world.
The UC sessions covered presence, IM and collaboration, along with an assessment of IBM and Microsoft platforms for collaboration and unified communications. To kick things off, there was a three-hour tutorial moderated by Melanie Turek of Frost and Sullivan.
Melanie began with an overview of the market, unified communications definitions, application examples, issues and trends. She also shared the results of a survey of enterprise customers assessing the awareness and frequency-of-use of UC’s components. Among the most interesting findings: While awareness of IM was essentially universal (98%), awareness of presence was very low: Unaided, fewer than 5% of 251 respondents knew what presence was or could accurately define it; when prompted, however, about three-quarters of the respondents could do so. Regarding usage, about one-third of the respondents used IM daily, and another one-third not at all. Not surprisingly, audio conferencing was among the most frequently used technologies; video the least.
Following Melanie’s introduction, there were presentations and demonstrations by Allan Mendelsohn from Avaya, Akiba Saeedi and David Marshak from IBM, Paul Haverstock from Microsoft, Gary Cattarin of Nortel and Ross Sedgewick from Siemens. The format allowed the speakers to present their product solutions, and discuss specific features and functionality. Many discussed integration of their suites into other applications, and most mentioned incorporating communications into business processes (a favorite theme of the gang at UC Strategies).
Each supplier also demonstrated their system’s functionality; sort of a mini-tour of the exhibition hall. One of my takeaways from the demos: The vendors have made considerable progress over the last six months in providing more seamless integration of their products both into business applications and partner products.
Ironically, this presentation of the latest and greatest in unified communications gear was hamstrung by challenges of balky demos and a rash of video-cable screwups. The AV guys couldn’t get many of the PCs hosting the demos connected to the room monitors. One Rube Goldberg solution emerged—send one vendor’s presentation through another’s working system. Now that’s what I call unified communications.
The tutorial succeeded in presenting the state of the UC industry. While leaving the session, an architect from a major manufacturing company told me, “Now I get it. I was having trouble sorting all of this out before. Too much marketing hype and not enough examples of how things really work. I have a better idea of what we should be looking for at our company.”
At this stage of market evolution, that’s a very positive comment.
What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@vanguard.net or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
Don Van Doren
Vanguard Communications and UCStrategies.com
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