Unified Communications Evolves, What's Next?

I had the opportunity to participate in my first Industry Buzz podcast as a new UCStrategies Expert. What a blast that was!

Imagine eight of the most knowledgeable analysts and consultants of UC, mobility and IT trends in North American discussing and sharing our thoughts and opinions on what is happening in the world UC?

Blair Pleasant led the discussion based on her recent article "Introducing Optimized Communications." Each one of us brought our perspective to the article to provide commentary and insight on how Unified Communications is evolving.

UC Evolves

We discussed and agreed that while the UC technology solutions have evolved, perhaps it is time for the term "UC" to change, too! Blair calls this next generation of UC as "Optimized Communications."

As we discussed the evolution from our various viewpoints, I mentioned that we had been referring to this next generation of UC as Enhanced Converged Communications (or ECC) for short time due the fact the new UC solutions involve telephony, messaging and collaboration applications converged together with business applications and processes.

As our discussion evolved, we then came up with the Optimized Converged Communications or "OCC" for short. Reminds me of some of our FOX GROUP folks previous corporate days in telecom industry products where they were trying to come up with names for new technical products to bring to market. Go Figure! We decided we would stick with Optimized Communications and continue to chat.

Reflecting on the podcast made me think about the vendor and client challenges we are hearing about that would be useful to share.

Vendor Challenges

Fromour client project implementations, we have observed how the industry is challenged to provide clients with the real business value and total cost of ownership (TCO) that UC solutions deliver (both on the vendor and client side).

We have also observed that there is a broad cross section of skills sets and knowledge required that we, as customers, expect vendors to bring to the table in order to design, install and manage real converged UC solutions. This includes skills in IT servers, PCs, operating systems, combined with network hardware and performance management, through to various telephony, messaging, contact centre and collaboration applications.

If we, as potential clients, don't see evidence of these various capabilities and expertise, we are very unlikely to trust the industry and vendors and give them money out of corporate wallets, let alone define and defend the investments required.

Client Expectations

Clients say they are not sure how to purchase, acquire and support next-generation UC solutions. They also tell us that technology vendors haven't provided TCO models with examples of the best practices and the sample categories by industry segment to build their own model and prove business value for their firm. If vendors helped them in these two areas, it would enable the clients to justify technology costs and prove value of the UC investments.

Next New Thing - UC 3.0 Goes Cloud

FOX GROUP defines this third generation of UC as Enhanced Converged Communications, or "ECC." It is the ability to communicate across voice, data, networks, computing devices and multiple applications delivered over wired and wireless networks; to and from wherever people work. It also adds the ability to integrate into current and future business applications.

Technology industry and client business leaders keep telling us they want to move to "The Cloud" to simplify things related to IT, and believe they will be able to reduce their overall IT costs by doing this. This applies to VoIP, UC and contact centre technologies.

Our observations and analysis from early adopter UC and Cloud projects, from our VoIP/UC acquisition projects at FOX GROUP, the client RFP technology and pricing analysis engagements have become much more complex and time consuming due to the complexity of UC technology solutions and various vendor approaches.

The time to complete the strategies, architectures and future designs are taking significantly more time due to the fact there is significantly more up front future business requirements definition and analysis required.

This also leads to the need to define future business requirements, internal technology profiles with communications requirements in order to define technical specifications. It is also necessary to identify the types of organization, skills, etc., that the clients are willing to supply and provide, and have the vendors do the same.

It is also necessary to identify the clients' future vendor requirements related to support, management, strategy and approach, i.e. single vendor, multiple vendors, managed versus monitored, what performance reports, expectations and level of details do they want to see, etc.

These factors all have to be discussed and agreed to so that the RFP technical specifications, vendor and financial analysis tools are appropriately detailed, and thorough, so that you are comparing "apples to apples" across various vendors and approaches. All of these factors affect the RFP content, analysis, vendor selection and negotiations time and effort required to ensure successful technology acquisition and implementations.

A structured, well-defined acquisition approach with supporting methods and processes will result in a clear, accurate technical and business roadmap for prospective vendors, the client, their internal organization and the customers they service. The organization will also have an accurate TCO they can measure and monitor over time.

One of the most important points is that they will have a successful technology environment supported by appropriate vendors, able to deliver positive business results for their organization.

What Comes Next?

How do you monitor and measure the TCO to ensure you are getting the promised results? We have and will continue to do daily tracking of time, effort and output to identify the challenges and business benefits from our third generation UC evolution.

I am happy to say that we are finally getting real, sustainable productivity benefits on average per person, as well as reduction in overall IT operating cost savings from our UC cloud solutions, which also delivers positive bottom line results!

Feel free to contact me, and I would be happy to set up time to spend 15 minutes via phone or web video discussing the results of our own UC third generation journey, including the costs, challenges and benefits based on our third generation of using the latest VoIP/UC converged technologies. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback!