Unified Communications Proves Integration Challenge

One of the high-tech industry’s success stories this year has been the beginning of the mainstreaming of unified communications (UC), with many more businesses — particularly small and midsize ones — exploring installations for at least pockets of their team. I call it the “beginning,” because although there has been a lot of coverage and speculation about adoption, you can’t really say that UC is mainstream yet.

What’s more, the holy grail of end-to-end UC has been much more elusive.

While many companies are experimenting with at least one application under the UC umbrella, far fewer have managed to integrate them together into an uber-unified-messaging or collaboration solution.

A new survey released by market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) suggests that one-third of all companies with less than 100 employees and almost three-quarters of companies with 100 to 999 employees own (their verb, not mine) at least one UC component technology. The tools that fall under this description include voice over IP (VoIP); audio, Web or video conferencing; and unified messaging.

The big driver in adoption has been the cost-cutting proposition. This has been a particular boon for driving use of conferencing technologies, which have become a common alternative to business meetings and business travel wherever appropriate and possible.

But very few of the early adopters have pieced together UC solutions that include all of the above, according to IDC. Unified messaging, in particular, has been slow to catch on, the firm writes in its report on this topic (“Unified Communications in U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Business, 2011: Growing Demand for Communication, Collaboration and Connectivity — But Integration Remains Elusive”).

Commenting about the report, IDC research manager Justin Jaffe said:

“Many SMB business and IT priorities relate to communication and collaboration. SMBs are interested in both underlying capabilities and specific UC technologies. The real challenge for vendors is to effectively connect the benefits of unified communications to improved business performance. Show how UC can make a real difference in productivity and efficiency and SMBs will flock to it.”

On paper, unified messaging seems like a super idea. Don’t you hate going to multiple inboxes to retrieve all the messages that are streaming in? At the very least, what IS working are technologies that let people forward their work phone to their mobile phone so that they can be available for clients or colleagues who need them when they are on the road. But I think you have to remember to activate this feature right now, if you remember.

In any even, I would suggest that one reason adoption of end-to-end solutions has been slow is pretty simple: It is complicated. Not just to piece together from a technology standpoint, but also for people who are just trying to get their job done. The last thing that SMBs can deal with right now is more complications when the thing they really need to focus on is driving more revenue and keeping costs low. Over time, unified communications will become a reality, but let’s focus on what is working. It is increasingly clear that there isn’t a “one time” project for deploying UC, this is a solution that will trickle into the business world over time.