VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly Issue 127, September 15, 2009
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of UC eWeekly is sponsored by Empirix
SIP Trunking Services provide many benefits for enterprises over current, legacy ISDN trunk lines, including significant cost savings, access to new services, and integration with existing IP based services and business applications.  [...]

If, on the other hand, you see UC as part of the ongoing evolution of communications technology, and as part of the never-ending transformation in how that technology gets used, half full would be right, and not a bad thing.

That’s my perspective after reading an impressive two-part article on No Jitter by Brent Kelly– see “Do You See What I See Shaping UC?” at www.nojitter.com. Brent has done all of us in the industry a service by compiling a list of 10 issues that present the good, bad and the ugly about UC.

Among the good:

*UC is expected as part of a communications offering: UC is table stakes – no one can compete without a full complement of UC capabilities.

* While UC technologies continue to mature, they’re stable, they integrate with back office elements such as corporate directories, calendars, office productivity applications and they interface with voice — the most common communications medium of all.

There’s no doubt that the cloud offers some important benefits, many of which McMillan describes in his post. And there’s also no question that there are successful cloud-based services that enterprises are buying and using; Salesforce.com and Amazon’s EC2 come to mind.

But when it comes to porting over enterprise communications and IT operations, it seems that the key question is whether the cloud is a long-term play or merely a response to short-term budget belt-tightening. Timeshare systems disappeared and Centrex’s enterprise market share continues to shrink because of two inter-related issues: First, cost — enterprises found that the total cost of renting exceeded the cost of ownership of IT facilities, equipment and personnel. Second, flexibility and responsiveness – the owner of the cloud determines what capabilities will go into the cloud, when upgrades will occur and when new capabilities will be added. The pace at which an enterprise’s requirements change, however, won’t always fit with the cloud owner’s investment schedule.

To be sure, there’s been progress. Just this week, Sprint issued a press release entitled, in part, “Unified Communications Enabled by Sprint Now Available…” but it’s less about UC than it is about Sprint playing catch up on connectivity. The core of the announcement is that Sprint will connect three of its services — MPLS, SIP Trunking and Mobile Integration — to three important UC systems: Cisco’s Call Manager, Microsoft’s OCS R2 and IBM’s Lotus SameTime IP Telephony.

Forgive me, but what I found most notable about the release is that Sprint is rolling out SIP Trunking – customers have been growing impatient for that service for some time, and not because they can’t wait to implement UC. But I’m still not sure just when and where Sprint intends to make SIP Trunking available – when I searched on “SIP Trunking” on Sprint’s website, the results came back empty.

A visit to AT&T’s website produced similarly unsatisfying results. My search for “Unified Communications” came back with information about how I could tie together aspects of my business using “….audio, web, and video collaboration tools.” Not much new there.

And the good news is that VoiceCon Orlando showcased the availability of communications and collaboration capabilities that the industry has been talking about for decades, at precisely the moment when almost every company is acknowledging that the old ways of doing business simply won’t do. In short, it really is a remarkable point in history: The means to fundamentally change how we communicate are at our disposal, and the incentives to change couldn’t be more obvious.

Despite being a relative newcomer on the scene, UC has already played a significant role in getting the industry to this new plateau. The power of UC is that previously separate elements — voice and voicemail, text and IM, presence and email, conferencing and video – can be combined across both wireless and wireline domains. So UC presents a framework that enables us to stop thinking about “voice” or “data”, “messaging” or “video” and, instead, focus on overall “communications” – providing our organizations with the ability to reach whoever they need to reach when – and how — they need to reach them.

Overall revenue in the quarter declined 7.5% year-over-year to $9.1 billion, and net income was $1.5 billion, off 27% year over year. Product revenue declined year-over-year by 11% and, in what Cisco calls its “core product areas” – switching and routing — year-over-year revenue was down 23%. Unified Communications revenues also declined, but only by single-digits – down 5% year-over-year.

During VoiceCon there were many presentations that emphasized how UC could help companies save money and improve productivity during these troubled times, but I didn’t get the sense that the audience was taking those messages to heart. Instead, what I did hear from attendees, loudly and often, is considerable interest in finding low-cost solutions to real day-to-day problems. In short, enterprises are interested in solving problems. If UC is the best tool, so be it; if it’s not, the enterprise will quickly move on by.

While I enjoyed Allan Sulkin’s post, I found a comment that came in response, apparently from someone on the buyer’s side of the table, to be particularly compelling: “You said it Allan. Everything is UC these days and it’s really hurting the process in creating a real strategy. The vendors are making it harder for us to actually buy a solution because it takes so long to interpret 25 different products all named the same.” Now maybe in the “good old days” vendors could ignore such sentiments, but given the current market climate, if customers are saying that vendors are “making it harder for us to actually buy a solution….” isn’t it time for the industry to rethink its modus operandi?

In these tough economic times, UC and the new wave of communications it represents, need to deliver sooner rather than later. So far, the UC vendors have yet to offer tightly integrated and interoperable products. The disjointed offerings make it tough to confidently predict ROI and so writing a UC business case remains more art than science.

For some of the most storied names in telecommunications, yesterday was both an end and a beginning. The spin-off of Siemens Enterprise Networks (SEN) and a leadership shake-up at Alcatel-Lucent, both a long-time coming, are finally under way, and the ripple effects will be felt by many within our industry, and for some period of time.