Carl Weinschenk spoke with Michael Finneran, the president of dBrn Associates. Finneran is the author of InformationWeek Reports' "State of Unified Communications," which was released last week.
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Unified communications is still making progress, and that progress seems slower than what it should be based on the tremendous benefits it can pay. Michael Finneran tells IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk that too many businesses think deploying unified communications requires purchasing an IP PBX. The next stage, he says, is embedding communications tools inside productivity applications.
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?Collaboration is one of several elements in a real unified communications solution. With unified communications you are describing a mix of voice, video, email, text and collaboration with a single shared interface. So there seems to be a confusion.?
- Michael Finneran
- President
dBrn Associates
Weinschenk: What is the research about?
Finneran: InformationWeek Analytics does annual surveys of different topics, and unified communications is one of them. We try to keep questions consistent and have a baseline to compare year to year. Comparing year over year to the study done in April of 2010 suggests that UC deployments are increasing. The companies that deployed and utilized UC jumped from 30 to 36 percent ? but confusion seems to reign. Thirty-one percent said they have plans to deploy in 24 months. There is slow but steady progress.
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Weinschenk: Why do you say there is confusion?
Finneran: Given some of the descriptions of what people thought UC was, I am not sure they were talking about deploying anything but an IP PBX. One of the questions we asked was what the key technologies for unified communications for them was on a scale of 1 to 5. The top 3 turned out to be collaboration, VoIP and unified messaging.
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Weinschenk: What is the significance of that?
Finneran: If things like VoIP and unified messaging are at the top of the list ? and ahead of core UC functions like IM and presence ? the community is misunderstanding what UC really is. I think the vendor marketing has distorted the users? view, particularly the bigger companies like Cisco. They are moving away from even using the term "unified communications." They are using "collaboration."
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