Unified Communications: Concepts and Business Applications

ISSUE PAPER
Unified Communications Real-Time Communications Concepts and Business Applications By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Pr ogram Director, Collaboration and Convergence, Nemertes Research
Executive Summary
Unified communications has the potential to dramatically simplify and improve enterprise communications, as well as improve business agility. By integrating various forms of communications, such as voice, video, instant messaging, conferencing, presence and voicemail, individuals can more effectively control and manage their inbound and outbound communications sessions. Enterprises further stand to benefit from communications-enabled business processes whereby the integration of communications services with enterprise business applications and processes enables business intelligence and presence awareness to drive communications-session management. Enterprises that adopt unified communications will see significant competitive advantage, both from more efficient internal operations and improved customer interaction. However, vendors and enterprises must address significant management and interoperability concerns before the reality of unified communications meets the vision.
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The Issue
As enterprises migrate to VOIP they're also increasingly adopting a number of other IP-based, real-time applications including instant messaging, audio, Web and video (both room-based and desktop) conferencing, and real-time communications dashboards. In interviewing about 100 enterprises for our "Building a Successful Virtual Workplace" benchmark, Nemertes confirmed that for most of these applications, adoption rates exceed 50%. (Please see Figure 1: Real-Time Application Usage).
Figure 1: Real-Time Application Usage As the number of communications applications has increased, so has the complexity for the end user. An individual must go through a series of steps to determine the best communications application or service to use depending on a given situation, location or time of day. Attempts to reach colleagues often result in numerous voice messages or chat requests across multiple services and devices, including desktop and mobile phones. For example, suppose "John" wants to call "Joe." John may first try to send an instant message to Joe. After not getting a response, he calls Joe's desk phone and leaves a voice message. He then calls Joe's mobile phone. Again not getting an answer, he leaves a message. Finally, John sends Joe an e-mail or SMS message with the hope that Joe will read it on his mobile device. The end result of this example is that John went through a series of steps, but was never able to reach Joe. Joe has messages in multiple places that he must retrieve
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and delete. The growing variety of applications made communications more, not less, complex, leading to increased frustration and reduced efficiency. In addition to the growing number of communications applications, one must also factor in the changing nature of the knowledge worker. Individuals increasingly work from multiple locations, including home offices, hotels, conference centers, partner locations and airports. Mobile devices are often limited in the applications that they support, yet remote workers still need access to communications services. What is needed is a way of integrating various forms of real-time communications and collaboration applications so individuals can manage all their communications in an integrated fashion, in both desktop and mobile environments. This will offer individuals the ability to not only control how they contact others, but how others can contact them. Enter Unified Communications "Unified communications" defines the establishment of an integrated set of user interfaces for all communications services. It further defines the integration of both real-time and non-real-time communications services to bring context and presence to the communications environment. Inherent in the unified-communications architecture is the Real-Time Com... [download for more]