Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, 12/20/06

It’s the end of the year, so that means that all good Bloggers must dedicate at least one posting to summing up the highlights of the past year, and boldly stating predictions sure to come true for the next. So grab your cup of eggnog and let’s go.

It would be an understatement to declare 2006 as the year of “Unified Communications”, at least from a real-time collaboration perspective. 2006 was the year that UC achieved critical mindshare in the enterprise, led by extensive marketing efforts from Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel and many others. The overwhelming majority of enterprise IT managers I speak with understand the coming together of various real-time communications technologies, and the value that such integration presents. They understand the potential for integration of communications technologies with enterprise business processes to improve efficiency, transactions, and tasks. They expect that their communications vendors will have a UC story to tell.

But, there is still considerable confusion about unified communications. As I wrote back in August, I tend to view implementation of UC as a two step process, with the first step being integration of real-time communications applications into a single set of user interfaces, followed by the application of open interfaces to enable communications applications to directly interface with business process applications. But unfortunately all too often I ask folks about their UC plans and receive a response that confuses unified communications with unified messaging or with just VOIP.

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