Unified Communications: Battle for the Middle Ground

Telecom vendors, IT suppliers and IP Comms specialists are all rallying behind the Unified Comms banner - but is there room for everyone?

Unified Comms (UC) has been described as the middle piece in the hamburger. The meaty layer that sits between the old world of legacy equipment at the bottom and the exciting world of advanced communication possibilities (such as video conferencing, web collaboration, customer interaction, IM, presence and unified messaging) at the top. The enabler. The glue that binds it all together.

Its perhaps an over simplistic analogy but one that’s useful when it comes to answering the question ‘so where does everyone fit in?’

And the interesting bit in the UC stack to many people is the middle layer.

In today’s communications world, a PBX, video conferencing or contact centre solution provider would typically provide a complete hardware and software package, including the applications.

In the visionary world of UC, though, there’s the glue to consider – and who would a large enterprise customer go to for that? Their phone or video conferencing system supplier? Possibly not. They’re more likely to go to a company such as IBM, Microsoft or Cisco – and that could make customer relationships a whole lot more complex.

“According to Gartner, there are 16 features that comprise a complete UC solution and those cannot possibly come from a single vendor – not in any form today, and never in a best-of-breed collection” says Mark Swendsen, EMEA MD at ShoreTel. “To get the full benefits of UC, businesses need to build an infrastructure that can integrate the best UC applications into a seamlessly unified environment.”

Microsoft has already made its stance about such multi vendor comms environments pretty clear http://www.voipinbusiness.co.uk/microsoft_states_its_credentia.asp. It has an interesting set of unified comms capabilities that can serve customer needs with regards instant messaging, email, presence, video conferencing etc. but accepts that it doesn’t expect to own the customer relationship when it comes to voice communications.

According to Mark Deakin from Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, Microsoft is more interested in working with leading voice vendors. Vendors such as Mitel and Nortel are working on providing native support for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 software. For everyone else, Microsoft looks to its specialist partners to deliver integration through gateways (powered, for example, by Dialogic, Audiocodes and other technology).

That said, Microsoft’s Innovative Communications Alliance with Nortel does open up possibilities. At it’s own UK HQ, for example, desktop phone extensions are a mixture of Nortel PBX and Microsoft OCS extensions – and, according to Deakin, a number of large customers have expressed an interesting doing likewise.

IBM’s stance to UC, and to voice communications, is markedly different to that of Microsoft. It claims to deliver ‘complete software, services and hardware solutions’ for UC ‘in partnership with leading telephony, audio, and video vendors’. Cisco’s stance, as a major supplier of complete PBX, contact centre, video conferencing etc. systems, is different again.

No surprise therefore that Microsoft’s Deakin says that UC means different things to different people - and that Alcatel-Lucent’s Nigel Jones claims the more customers talk about UC, the more confused they often get.

“Anything that gets people talking about IP solutions can’t be a bad thing. However unless there’s a hard ROI – or clear benefit, the evidence suggests that companies aren’t going to buy it, whatever it is” claims Jones.

“Organisations are concerned with practical issues. Such as ‘how can I simplify the way I support conferencing in my business, give employees better tools and save on costs?'  With UC, companies are starting at the ground level, typically looking to see how they can add elements of UC on legacy systems to maximise existing investment. Only once the value of this has been proven are they moving onto the next thing. Integrating video, web collaboration, IM, presence etc. comes further down the line.”

POSTcti is a company that sits in the middle ground between Microsoft and the PBX vendors. According to its Sales and Marketing Director, Nigel Horncastle “there is no doubt that since Microsoft announced their Unified Communications strategy a couple of years ago, most of the PBX vendors suddenly announced or revamped their own offerings around their own UC banner. However, whereas the Microsoft UC approach is totally hardware vendor agnostic, this will never be the case for the PBX vendors as they currently earn revenue out of shifting their own hardware and support contracts”.

So what is the best approach for an organisation that wants to invest in the benefits of UC? “No one will argue that Microsoft owns the desktop and that is where the UC battle will be won, not on the server/PBX choice" claims Horncastle. "VoIP has been around for 10 years but how many firms have implemented it? Likewise with audio and video conferencing. By integrating UC functionality into a single client and inbox that surfaces on desktops, laptops, mobile phones and PDAs, users can now access UC from wherever they choose to work. Forget about all the cost savings, benefits, efficiency improvements, compliance needs etc., if a user cannot easily use UC functionality they won’t use it at all. The bottom line is that Unified Communications is now a ‘solution’, not a ‘technology’ sale.”

With the emphasis firmly on solution-selling it's no surprise that Shoretel’s Svensson believes there’s plenty of opportunity for resellers in the big picture. “We see a great opportunity for Value Added Resellers to deliver what is required with a resilient and flexible voice infrastructure at the centre – something that no single vendor can do on their own.”

And there’s the irony.  Because driving ‘full-on’ unified communications through your organisation today doesn’t mean consolidating down to a single technology developer – even if it is managed through a single reseller/ supplier. If anything, given the current capabilities of UC suppliers, it means relying on more technology developers, not less.