Unified Communications and Collaboration: The Next Strategic Advantage

Presenter: Steve Blood

Different approaches to unified communications. Telephony centric offerings most mature, though only a little more than e-mail and collaboration. From our perspective, UCS is where they think the value will be long term.

• What are the benefits of unified communications and where is the value?
  
• What are communications-enabled business processed and why are they important?
  
• What does the magic quadrant tell us about the vendors?
  

There is no single UC product. It is a portfolio of products. IM is going to change the way people work—next generation dial-tone. Presensivity will drive activity. If these technologies are not taken up across the institution, they are still very valuable for ISS and can make us more efficient as we move forward. Consider also whether access to stakeholders' presence information becomes requirement for engagement in an ISS project… that would be possible if we can measure and prove the advantage.

Users more easily escalate to the most effective combination of collaboration services for the task at hand. Click-to-call is neat, but doesn't necessarily provide business value. Business value comes from collaborative unified communication. Strategic value comes from enterprise unified communications. We will need to work out what stops people from embracing the technologies—is there an analogy with e-mail—what was the tipping point for e-mail and how can we bring forward the tipping point for IM and collaboration?

Context-specific presence lists: create a list of individuals based on specific current needs (I need to speak to some one on the Agresso project team—who is on-line). This is a very powerful notion and is provided to an extent through Sharepoint. But to see this through IM would be that much more useful.

Flexible conferencing and escalation: switching between different tools as the content of the communication changes. Making the switch as easy as possible helps ensure that issues get resolved.

Intelligent Notification Services: notification is by end-users' preferred methods. Using location services and presence to notify nearest person based on role or responsibility. This notion seems related to the context-specific presence lists.

Microsoft is in the top of the magic quadrant: OCS is the product that puts them there. Cisco are trending down and in the challengers quadrant. "IBM is the largest installer of MSFT Exchange in the world…" (wow).

We need to look at whether there are strategic themes of communication and collaboration that require of us that we take forward unified communications—maybe as much to ensure that we don't get left behind as to provide a clear advantage to researchers: to give them seamless, frictionless communications across the university and across the world.