Unified Communications Ascends to Top Business Priority

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Communications Management  

Trendy IT consulting companies have been singing the praises of unified communications for several years. If you’re looking for a striking example of convergent technologies in action that also have a profound effect on the IT marketplace, unified communications fits the bill.

Why is UC  so important?
Gartner predicts that most companies will implement UC systems during the next three years.

Cisco vice president and general manager Rick McConnell says it’s because it eliminates communication chaos. Two years ago, he precisely outlined UC’s benefits. When you look past all the verbiage and tech- and corporate-speak about the trend, he said that organizations have too many communication methods. There are phones (in many variations), voice messaging, e-mail, fax,  mobile clients and media conferencing.

It was blatantly obvious that the answer to “communication chaos,” as McConnell called it, was UC, or the integration point across a number of different technologies and applications. “Where TDM (time division multiplexing telephony) was about dial tone and placing phone calls, UC incorporates a number of different types of devices,” he explained. In short, cell phones, softphones and desk phones are combined with a number of different types of applications, from instant messaging to e-mail to video telephony to rich media …

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