Assessing Unified Communications’ Impact in 2011

The unified communications and collaboration space saw a lot of movement in 2010, so it’s no surprise that the technology is top of mind for a number of vendors as they plot out their channel course for 2011. Cisco Systems, for one, is betting on five big trends it believes will steer the direction of UCC in the coming year, and hopes its channel partners will follow accordingly.

Eric Schoch, senior director of product management in Cisco’s Voice Technology Group, laid out Cisco’s vision of UCC through the five trends and noted that the company has already come out with or soon will be coming out with technologies that support these trends. Channel partners in the UCC space may have seen some of these trends already making an impact, but Cisco believes they will largely shape the way companies — and their customers — utilize communications technologies going forward.

In a nutshell, Cisco is staking its claim in:

Video: Video has always struggled with cost (of both endpoints and bandwidth), interoperability and ease of use/QoS, but the availability of technologies that solve those issues coupled with the need for companies to save money on travel costs is making video more attractive to companies large and small.

Schoch summed it up nicely: “Video was traditionally bloody hard to use. When VCRs first came out people had a hard time using them, and making a video call was much the same way. But there is a lot of convergence of technology coming down and solving these issues, and now because those technologies are becoming inherently more available making a video call today should be as easy as making a regular voice call.”

Clearly, Cisco’s moves in both the enterprise space (with Cius) and consumer space (Umi) in 2010 show the company is betting big on video as the next de facto standard of communication.

Presence: Moving forward, presence no longer will be a separate application. Rather, it will be built in to whatever communications technology we’re using — be it video, audio or collaboration tools – and even further into the architecture of the network. “For this whole thing to work, presence must be fundamental to how we communicate – it will be part of everything we do,” Schoch said. “You will see more coming from the area of how to take presence and truly integrate into the communications architecture and management as opposed to being an overlying application.”

Cloud: Surprise! Even Cisco is jumping into the cloud game, with an eye toward enabling UCC applications in the cloud. “We should be able to deliver a ubiquitous user experience regardless of where the technology is actually deployed,” Schoch said. “Desktop virtualization goes with that as well. So we then have a very plausible trend brewing, which is the enterprise asking itself, Why do we need to have it all on-prem?”

The company has already forged agreements with service providers including Verizon Business and BT to enable cloud-based UCC, and Schoch hinted that even more would be happening – both technology-wise and partner-wise – in 2011.

Borderless Enterprise: “This is really all about mobility,” Schoch noted. “Extending the traditional walls of the enterprise into the wireless environment and not needing multiple devices to do that.” In other words, having one mobile device that will truly enable access to enterprise apps anywhere and in a format that can be easily digested (I’m thinking tablet). Schoch said Cisco is also looking at ways the company can integrate hosted collaboration solutions into mobile architectures to enable existing 3g devices to become enterprise-like devices without using a soft client. “We’re also developing some positions to see what we can do in the hosted environment in regards to machine-to-machine communication.”

Blurring the Lines: Cisco, like its counterparts, understands the power of social networks as a collaboration vehicle, and has plans to integrate social apps such as Facebook or Twitter into contact center applications to allow users of those sites to connect directly and enable companies to have an even deeper level of communication with their customers. “We all see it – the lines are blurring, so integrating these mediums into how we fundamentally communicate to yield a return is something I think we’ll be seeing more and more of,” Schoch said. “It’s undeniable. Tech companies that take advantage of that and integrate are the ones partners will want to work with.”

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