Unified communications – the state of play
Since then it has come into its own as an integrated family of applications offering business process efficiencies, increased productivity, cost-savings and other business benefits, as well as efficient, intuitive and customer-friendly business communication.
The increased maturity, sophistication and standardisation of UC platforms has further made it accessible to a wide range of businesses, giving small and medium enterprises the incalculable value of a professional, ‘big business’ look and feel.
The first step in the UC evolution came two or three years ago, when UC crystallised into a baseline vision focused on the integration of voicemail, e-mail and fax. Beyond that, there was little consensus on the course of its development, and uptake remained slow. Still, everyone agreed UC would bring about a momentous shift on the converged landscape.
Today, productive collaboration and presence management are a reality in unified comms, and uptake is significant.
Common UC functionality
Even in South Africa, despite our problems with bandwidth availability and cost, the concept is on the rise in the mid-market and enterprise.
For instance, a degree of fixed-mobile convergence is in evidence, such as the ability to field an office line call from a mobile phone.
In addition, home ‘extensions’ to office communications systems are rising in popularity, mainly due to ADSL becoming more prevalent. Collaboration tools are being used more frequently and desktop integration is seamless and rich.
The tipping point
A major factor driving the general uptake of UC tools and platforms is their integration with platforms like Outlook. Many users are familiar with Outlook, making it a natural centre of unified communications, especially at the lower end of the market.
Linking their voicemail to their calendar sets the following typical workflows in motion:
- An unanswered call combined with a conflicting calendar meeting automatically prompts the user’s ‘unavailable’ voicemail.
- An unanswered call coupled without a conflicting appointment forwards the call to the mobile ‘extension’, and when that goes unanswered, calls up a different voicemail. With impressive intelligence, the system notifies the caller that the party is neither on the phone nor in a meeting, and therefore in all likelihood somewhere close-by.
The addition of presence management will make the experience even more satisfying.
Naturally, users of the system can program its sequence of choices as desired, but the beauty is that an ecosystem of truly unified communications technologies will allow doing so in one place, with changes propagated throughout the system.
The benefits are widespread and entail both measurable and intangible advantages. Unified communication tools such as presence awareness and follow-me-extensions allow tasks to be completed more quickly and productively.
More intangibly, the customer experience is enhanced and the impression of sophisticated technology does not go unnoticed with customers.
The future
What lies ahead for UC?
While communications integration into the desktop has become commonplace, UC has not yet attained back-office integration. It seems likely that communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs) are a thing of the near to medium-term.
In the longer-term, voice will reach its end-state of being just another hardware-independent, platform-agnostic application on the network. It may ultimately be offered as a standard bundle with a UC vendor’s core collaboration suite or operating system, along with value added applications.
Whether the voice app will reside on corporate servers or in the cloud comes down to user acceptance.
All these developments are consistent with the current push for the ever-tighter integration of voice into the business. Currently, we seem to be heading into a productive era in our adoption of this family of technologies, one that could last many years and will see the continuous development of high-value functionality.
Unified Communications << discussion
In future columns Bennie plan to address UC success factors and best practices, delivery methods, implementation challenges and vendor selection.
About Bennie Langenhoven | About Tellumat
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