Collaboration = UC

The Unified Communications (UC) market has now been around for 4 years, since the term became popular in 2006. I can safely say that the UC market has not lived upto its promise of delivering a seamless communications experience through the unification of different communication media and devices. The promise of that seamless experience improving user productivity, which would improve the ability to respond quicker, and ultimately embedding that communication capability into key business processes to make the enterprise more agile.

The problem never was the technology, but the deployment of the technology. The biggest competitor for the UC market was the existing communications market. Heterogeneity is many a times underestimated by our industry. Heterogeneous environments created significant barrier for the adoption of UC. To create that seamless communications experience enterprises needed to change/upgrade/migrate their existing investments into a UC-ready environment, and do that for all communication devices at the same time. That clearly did not happen.

We are in 2010, and we still see adoption of UC as a silo-ed & phased approach towards building a UC infrastructure. Enterprises chose to change/upgrade/migrate in phases, starting either with their telephony infrastructure or Email infrastructure, then adding applications that can integrate with these systems. So in effect, today, UC is no longer "a thing" enterprises are buying and deploying, but it is a "journey" that IT teams are embarking on, checking milestones one after one.

From that promise of UC in 2006, where click-to-call was the big buzz application, enterprises and vendors have come to realize the importance of the larger underlying market need of Collaboration. The promise of UC is beginning to take shape in the form a real market need of Collaboration. As enterprises embark on their UC "journey", and they already have Telephony systems and Email infrastructure. The next application that majority of enterprises are interested in is Conferencing & Collaboration.

Based on a survey of CIOs in Asia conducted by Frost & Sullivan, Collaboration ranked as the top application enterprises are looking to invest in as part of their UC deployments in the next 12-24 months. This is a significant insight. The insight is that for enterprises who already have telephony & email (which is a vast majority), the next step towards UC for them is Collaboration; which means that for these set of enterprises, moving to UC is equivalent to deploying Collaboration technologies i.e. Collaboration = UC.

Please note that I am not saying that UC = Collaboration. There is a slight difference. UC = Collaboration would mean that UC is only about Collaboration, but that is not true. UC has an even higher purpose, of collaboration, of mobility, of communication-enabling the business.

But from the enterprise-view, if Collaboration = UC is true, it means that vendors need to direct their efforts accordingly. We already see Cisco doing that in a big way. Cisco's acquisition over the last 2-3 years have demonstrated their seriousness about this market, their focus on completing a true UC portfolio, and their understanding of the larger Collaboration opportunity.
IBM has always talked about UC as UC squared i.e. UC & Collaboration. Microsoft also had a Collaboration-centric message. But other vendors such as Avaya, Siemens, Mitel, NEC, Aastra need to get their messages and importantly their solutions aligned as well.

Collaboration = UC would be the mega trend in the communications industry for atleast the next 24-36 months. Now, that's not a promise.