If you’ve been reading the UCStrategies.com blogs and newsletters, you know that we’ve defined two types of UC under the UC umbrella – UC-U (user productivity) and UC-B (business process). We realized that UC can really be considered in two separate contexts – one that helps individuals be more productive and effective at their jobs by providing capabilities like IM, presence, click-to-call, conferencing/collaboration, etc., focusing on user productivity, and one that focuses on business processes and integrating communications with these processes and applications.
It seems that we’re not the only ones thinking along these lines. I just returned from Nortel’s Global Connect event (Nortel’s annual enterprise user group’s conference), where we heard presentations from CEO Mike Zarirovski, Joel Hackney, President of Enterprise Solutions, and many others (it was a very packed day and a half). All of the presentations were interesting and informative, but the one presentation that really caught my attention was from Nortel’s CSO, Phil Edholm. Phil discussed how Nortel sees two types of UC – one type that focuses on the user, which Nortel refers to as Unified Communications and Collaboration, or UCc, and another type that focuses on the business or business processes, which it calls Unified Communications Business, or UCb. I thought either Phil had read some of my blogs and he slightly changed our acronym, or that great minds think alike – Phil told me it was the latter.
In short, according to Nortel, UCc deals with collaboration, SIP, and presence and is used by knowledge workers. It includes informal business processes, facilitating people-to-people communication. The value is primarily based around the user and is translated to business based on how people work.
UCb, on the other hand, is communication-enabled SOA, focusing on business transformation, and formal business processes, facilitating people to machine communication, The value is around the business, and it uses how people are working to drive business transformation. Phil noted that the UC collaboration market will flatten out since the number of knowledge workers are limited, instead UC will be purchased for UC business. I would have to agree with this, with the caveat that most companies will start with UCc (UC-U) and gradually move to UC-B.
Our definitions are slightly different, and of course we call it UC-U instead of UCc, UCb is a new term for what Nortel was referring to as Communication Enabled Applications, or CEA, which is also very similar to what Avaya calls CEBP.
David Downing, GM, Enterprise & SMB Communications Systems also discussed the two types of UC. He noted that Phase 1 of convergence focused on network convergence. We’re now in Phase 2, which is communications convergence, focusing on Unified Communication and Collaboration, or UCc, Phase 3 is UCb (UC business), or communication-enabled SOA. If you’ve seen my slide on the UC Continuum, then you’ll know that I’m in agreement with this assessment. Many enterprises start with UC-U or UCc (I’ll stick to the ucstrategies.com acronym of UC-U) and then evolve to UC-B. While the greater ROI comes from UC-B, there is important value in UC-U as well.
It was a worthwhile conference to attend, and it was nice to have some of my analysis and opinions on UC validated. For more info from the conference, listen to my podcast with Lori McLean about Nortel’s relationship with IBM.