Presence is the dial tone of the 21st Century 4 December, 2007 By Chris Talbot

The two market research firms combined their efforts to create two UC forecast reports -- the "Unified Communications Products Forecast" and the "Unified Communications Services Forecast." According to the research, as the worldwide supply chain has flattened, accelerated and globally dispersed, companies of all types and sizes need to streamline the flow of knowledge and information worker expertise, which unified communications provides. Additionally, there has been a lot of vendor activity in the space (from Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Systems, Avaya and others), partially driven by customer demand for integrated communications.

"What a number of these companies have done is they've created unified communications offerings as part of their product suite, and as a result of that, they've generated a lot of buzz in the marketplace," said Dr. E. Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research. That buzz has created a lot of interest in UC.

The entire UC products and services market is expected to be valued at $22.6 billion (US) in 2007, but Wainhouse and In-Stat expect the market to grow to $48.7 billion by 2012 -- a compound annual growth rate of 13.7 per cent. Kelly described it as a huge market.

"There are some real needs for this, too. These technologies have been around for a long time. There's not a lot that's really new here. What is new is the vendors are able to put this into a unified package they can offer to the end-users so they can offer instant messaging and presence . . . or ad-hoc video or instantaneous Web conferences," he said.

All elements of UC also use a common interface, so it's quick and easy to use, Kelly said. Since they're also presence-enabled, end-users don't have to reach out to somebody and find they're not there. They can check to see what is the best method to contact somebody at any given time. Presence is the dial tone of the 21st Century, he said.

"Just having that available to you and being able to look at it and click to dial or click to IM . . . it just makes these things so easy," Kelly said.

Although UC is still considered to be in the early adopter phase, Kelly noted that the technologies that make up UC have been around and commonly used for years. The technologies aren't what's new; it's the unification of them in one common interface that is, he said.

"End-users are using this stuff anyway, so what the vendors are doing is taking the opportunity to unify these communications they're already using," he said. It's a natural evolution, he added.

As UC grows in popularity, it doesn't mean that every company would roll out all elements of it, but Kelly said some of the technologies would be almost universal, including presence, IM, IP telephony and audio conferencing; Web conferencing, videoconferencing and other technologies might not be used by everybody but many companies would still choose to use them, he said.

Will it get rolled out to every desktop and every person, though? "I doubt it. That probably doesn't make sense," Kelly said.

Kelly recommended to organizations that they look at the way they use technologies and communications to see if it makes sense to roll out individual elements of UC. If they roll out everything without thinking, it will cost a lot of money and they won't get the benefit, but if they look at use cases, they can see which technologies would really help their businesses, he said. They should be judicious in how they deploy UC and deploy it only where it makes sense, he added.

"They'll need to have the capability to pick and choose, and IT organizations will need to have the capability to turn things on and off," Kelly said.