A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence:

See us at VoiceCon Orlando, Booth #935. Also plan to attend our Leading Edge-ucation Session “Beyond Cost Savings: The Real Value of VoIP,” Tuesday, March 18, Room 2, 5:15 p.m.

Interactive Intelligence was formed in 1994 and today is a global provider of unified business communications solutions for contact center automation, enterprise IP telephony and enterprise messaging-all-in-one solutions used in 3,000 organizations worldwide.

The UCStrategies.com team holds a weekly conference call to discuss “the state of the industry.” Last week a few members of the team were out attending UC conferences in Europe and Asia, but as we discussed our takeaways from those events, we found ourselves talking about the two ways in which enterprise customers view unified communications.

Blair Pleasant observed that most enterprise customers she has recently spoken with think about UC in terms of “click-to-call.” She went on to explain that click-to-call is evolving into easy access to any communications-click-to-communicate-via features and services found in a range of communications silos, including enterprise telephony, e-mail, voice mail/unified messaging and instant messaging, and audio, video and web conferencing. In other words, one path to UC focuses on integrating these various communication silos.

The other path to UC is via business process integration. Marty Parker and Don Van Doren (UniComm Consulting) explained that in their consulting engagements, most clients start with a discussion of how to ensure that a new technology acquisition-e.g., a PBX-supports a future unified communications environment-i.e., integrating (unifying) the communication silos. Marty and Don reported that while few if any clients initially consider the issue of integrating communications into business processes, once they understand the advantages of the business-process approach, most quickly become converts.

As I was listening to the conversation, I began seeing another way to view the paths to unified communications-horizontal vs. vertical. The horizontal path focuses on integrating communication modes, channels, and devices; it is the “click-to-communicate” approach, and delivers personal and team/workgroup benefits. Put another way, it’s what we’ve called UC’s Personal Productivity benefits.

The vertical path takes a broader view, and involves integrating communications into business processes. This can deliver enterprise-wide benefits-e.g., better customer service or faster sales cycles-but the key is that it is based on specific business processes. Some refer to this path as communication-enabled business processes (CEBP).

The UCStrategies.com team has been preaching a definition of unified communications: Communications integrated to optimize business processes. That definition covers both the horizontal and vertical paths to UC.

What I find interesting, however, is that enterprises continue to focus on the horizontal path, even as the major UC vendors and the emerging body of case studies detail the benefits to be gained from integrating communications into a business processes. To be sure, the “click to communicate” capabilities can deliver a decent ROI and make life easier for end users, but the vertical path-integrating communications with business processes-not only can deliver a great ROI, it also can help transform how a business runs and improve competitive advantage. Indeed, some enterprises that have embraced this vertical model report that ROI was not even a factor in their go/no-go analysis, because the improvements to the business processes were so compelling.

The UCStrategies.com team is in the process of developing a document to help enterprise customers understand the two paths to unified communications. Look for it on our website www.ucstrategies.com and on an upcoming UC Friday issue of NoJitter.com: www.nojitter.com.

In the meantime, what do you think? Are you a fan of the horizontal or vertical approach? Drop me a note at jburton@ustrategies.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Jim Burton
CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

Posted in Applications, Implementation, Jim Burton, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, Usability |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.