Unified Communications: Ready for Business
The convergence of e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and videoconferencing spells big gains for the people-ready business.
Published: July 20, 2007 By Lauren Gibbons Paul    

The simple art of communication has become mighty complex. You call a colleague on the telephone about an urgent matter. You get her voice mail, so you leave a message. Then you send an e-mail message. Next, you try her cell phone number. All to no avail.

Wouldn’t it be better if you hadn’t wasted your time mailing your colleague because you could see on the computer that she wasn’t online? Under a unified communications (UC) scenario, if you had called her work number, the system would have automatically forwarded your call to her cell phone, where you would track her down just minutes later. Embedded business rules help users prioritize calls—from a boss or best client, for example—and indicate their presence, or immediate availability, to some but not others.

Another example: You’re exchanging instant messages (IM) with a coworker. An issue comes up and you need to speak live. Thanks to integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, you can speak over IM. You can also bring in another client or colleague and review Microsoft Office PowerPoint slides together, thanks to integrated Web conferencing capabilities.

UC combines VoIP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, mobile communications, and audio and video Web conferencing on a single platform. Offering tremendous productivity benefits for people-ready businesses, UC capabilities are designed to help people reach each other for work more easily regardless of location or type of device (see chart, “Not Just Talk About UC”). With the barriers to daily communication significantly reduced, employees are free to focus on more value-added tasks such as improving operational efficiency, serving customers better, or improving products and services.

Some people worry that UC will mean constant interruptions by people they did not want to talk to (either at that moment or ever). That fear is not valid, says Lazar, because UC systems use filtering and business rules to ensure each individual is only as available as he or she wants to be. “People are concerned that once their presence status is online, it will be easier to interrupt them,” says Lazar. Privacy is another concern as people might not want everyone else to know where they are.

“Organizations have to create policies and business rules as to who can see each others’ presence so interruptions don’t become a problem,” says Lazar. Most UC platforms include the ability to block access to everyone except one or more named people.

Many say giving people control over their own access is the key to widespread acceptance. “The user can control the interaction. I can set the terms of the communication,” says Eric Swift, senior director of product management for the Unified Communications group at Microsoft. Users can register themselves as “unavailable” in the system, but they can also elect to give special access to certain individuals, such as their boss or a key client.

“If I have someone on the phone with a problem, I can use the UC platform to find people based on skill set and availability and bring them onto the call,” he says. When calls are no longer transferred endlessly, productivity increases, and so can customer satisfaction. Finally, when subject matter experts are brought together quickly and efficiently, they are free to focus on fresh, new ways to solve problems.

With the integration of Web and videoconferencing capability, the parties to a conversation can decide on the fly to open a whiteboard for better collaboration or even escalate the call to a videoconference. Parties can share and annotate documents, discussing topics via written chat or voice. “You can start wrapping context around communication today,” says Lazar. “It reduces the amount of time you spend trying to open a connection.”

In short, UC gives individuals greater control over their daily communications in three important ways:

1. By streamlining all the methods of contact into a single identity and place.
2. By being able to set one’s level of availability.
3. By allowing individual exceptions to the availability rules.

“I can control the onslaught of information and manage communication more effectively,” says Eric Swift of Microsoft. “And UC will be a powerful enabler for the people-ready business.”

Nemertes specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies. The company’s process for each benchmark is based on primary research, including detailed conversations with IT executives as well as vendors and service providers. More information is available at www.nemertes.com.