Peering past the UC frenzy

Any company who has recently implemented VOIP or is entertaining the idea has undoubtedly heard of unified communications (UC), due to the marketing frenzy that has hyped VOIP as the foundation for making unifying communication applications possible.

Despite the blitz, unified communications is still without one clear-cut definition. Yet there is an intersection of the datacom and telecom communities that are pushing the convergence of data connectivity, voice solutions and business applications in a way never seen prior to the emergence of VOIP. The resulting UC marketing explosion has been intense.

But is UC new? Not particularly. Much of the functionality behind UC and the business reasoning behind its use have been in call centres for decades. Presence and collaboration, for example, and getting to the right person with the right skill set are the foundation of the call centre - now contact centre. The morphing of the term call centre into contact centre was due to the maturation of the idea of the contact centre being more than calls, but different types of communication contacts or 'customer touch points' with the customer.

Further, as customers have become much more tech-savvy and mobile, they have grown accustomed to contacting the companies they do business with in more ways than walking in the front door or calling the contact centre. Going online to order, viewing videos or reading to get information, using Web chat with agents, or contacting businesses through e-mail are all growing avenues of contact.

This is also the basic premise behind UC: people reach each other in the manner that is easiest and most expedient at the time of their attempt and be given the tools, such as presence and collaboration, to get their jobs done more easily. Unified communication, it seems, is the extension of contact centre functionality into the enterprise, enabled by technology innovation that has allowed siloed enterprise communication applications to interoperate.

However, despite the hype, UC adoption is still in its infancy for various reasons. The adoption of VOIP, while increasingly more widespread, has a long way to go. Many vendors who are marketing UC have varying heritages and are still working on getting different applications to work together in their own portfolios, let alone work with others where they have a product void. Industry standards are in varying stages of completion or are works in progress. We need things such as partnership, so different IM applications can message each other, and we need to educate customers as to the impact that UC applications will have on their networks, just to point out a few issues.

Despite the hype, UC adoption is still in its infancy for various reasons.

Dave Paulding is sales director for UK and Africa, for Interactive Intelligence.

While the entire UC vendor community is aware of the issues and is actively working on solving them, innovation on core and new UC applications certainly hasn't ground to a halt. Life must go on. In fact, there is a growing movement, particularly among those vendors whose heritage is software-based, or who have made the switch to pure software solutions, to take a play from the contact centre history play book, and extend UC both back into the contact centre for agents to contact experts in the enterprise, and out to enterprise business applications.

We have come a long way from where the call centre was just a call centre - a silo in an organisation. We now have ways of linking business processes from the enterprise to what is now the contact centre. In the not too distant future we will have the ability to utilise full-scale business process automation out of the box, where business applications and communications are truly intertwined. In addition to the current push model that is event and notification driven, soon, each contact into an organisation will be an event that gets tracked, communication-enabled, and process driven by the PBX until the event is complete.

However, there is a lot of work to be done in extending the contact centre functionality across the enterprise. For unified communications to be simple, packaged solutions must be developed that have built-in intelligence about horizontal applications within enterprises for general applications, and deep process intelligence for any vertical market applications. The processes within those markets need to be understood and incorporated into a communications workflow. Those vendors that are software-based without functional walls or siloed enterprise communication applications to break down will have the easiest road, but eventually we will all get there.

* Dave Paulding is regional sales manager, UK and Africa, for Interactive Intelligence.