Conventional wisdom says that Unified Communications is about giving people a comprehensive portfolio of communications tools and providing a single unified user interface to these tools with the goal of making communications more effective, and of course "unified". For example, UC makes it easier to get a hold of someone on the first try, thereby reducing wasted time and improving business velocity.
While this is certainly a valuable aspect of Unified Communications, I believe it misses the bigger opportunity. The real promise of UC, in my opinion, is about finally turning communications into a software technology; rather than using software to provide a common user interface to a set of disjointed communications tools and appliances, the software itself becomes the “unified” communications tool.
The benefits of communications as a software capability are tremendous:
- First, a unified software platform allows for integration of communications software with other software applications, so that these software applications can provide the right context to the various parties communicating (this is typically referred to as contextual collaboration). This is about making communications a "first class citizen" in the workflow, if you will (call center software has historically done this well, but there are many more untapped opportunities in other applications).
- Second, it allows for the inverse: the capturing and recording of communications, and making recorded interactions part of the "context" that gets saved in enterprise databases. This translates "people memory" into "corporate memory", and enables much more efficient context switching between different people in an organization (e.g. multiple people providing the same role at different times, "hand-off" between time zones of tasks that get worked on 24/7, etc.)
- Finally (and often overlooked): it becomes possible to keep track of the real interactions that go on every day in an organization and extract common interaction patterns. These interaction patterns point out who the real information gatekeepers are in an organization, who the go-to people are, and who are the movers and shakers. Forget social networking software: let the system figure out where the real links are in an organization, independent of organizational boundaries.
This “communications as a software feature” drives much of Avistar’s product strategy. For example, the Avistar C3 Media Engine (and our associated Visual Insights program) is designed to video-enable a wide variety of software applications, web-based or with a rich user interface, running on PCs or on thin clients, If you have a need for interactive voice or video in your software application, sign up for our Visual Insights program and give our Media Engine a try! I assure you, you'll gain a whole new perspective on unified communications. The benefits of getting UC right are very compelling, see it for yourself.
http://www.avistar.com/products/Video-Conferencing-System-106.html
Chris Lauwers, Avistar CTO
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