Unified Communications Murkiness

Everyone is talking about UC these days.  But what is it?  And why hasn’t everyone deployed it yet?

First of all, UC is a murky topic.  Unified Communications at it’s most basic level is voice, email and presence/IM capability in an application.   And some companies are very particular about saying they have UC apps because they have the basic ones.  But UC can also mean voice conferencing, video conferencing, text messaging, collaboration / document sharing, and fax.   And this contributes to different price points and target market fit. 

 By the way, fax is not normally identified with UC, but in my mind it is critical for UC.  Fax continues to be integrated into health care and legal verticals, so fax will be important for UC in those environments.

Enterprises like to utilize UC because it can save employees time.  For instance, I hardly ever use voice mail anymore.  I can see if someone I want to talk to is online/available, and then if so, make the call.  Saves both of us time.   And I schedule internal conference calls using our UC system.  And during these conference calls, we can share documents on screen.  And I can do this when at work, at home, or on trip from a hotel room seamlessly.  All in all, compared to 10 years ago, I can safely say that UC has certainly enhanced Dialogic’s work environment, and hopefully made us more productive. 

However, like most enterprises, this has been a journey for us.  We didn’t just move to UC overnight.  The main driver for us many years ago was our main PBX going end-of-service.  It made economic sense for us to move to a new IP-based system.  And so we did it in stages. 

And this is precisely the reason many enterprises have not yet moved to a UC system.  The current environment is there, is paid for, and it works.  So like last week’s blog on gateways and SIP trunking and existing environments, a migration will continue for a long time.  While most of us think the move to IP in the enterprise is over because we live in that world every day, in reality, there is quite a long way to go before this PSTN to IP migration is over.  And so there will continue to be opportunities for various forms of Unified Communications in the enterprise.

Next week, I will explore cloud based UC, or Unified Communications as a Service.

Source: http://blog.dialogic.com/blog/unified-communications-murkiness

All Suppliers

Get Listed

	PREMIUMAvizent Ltd (VIEW OUR PAGE) Advanced AI technology and Natural Language Processing delivered to clients in the Cloud that harnesses both voice and digital conversations. The focus is on building an environment where intelligent ... (view more)
	PREMIUMCTI Software (VIEW OUR PAGE) CTI Software is the creator of custom application called Davos, which complements the telephone client solutions with intelligent features such as automated call attendant, call recording and archivin... (view more)
	PREMIUMFuture Gen International Pte Ltd (VIEW OUR PAGE) Outsourcing provider of English Call Centre services, Audio Transcriptions, Big Data ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) , Big Data Visualization, Big Data Predictive Model Generation

Get Listed

View more from Dialogic

Recent Blog Posts:

Panning for “Killer Apps” in the Gold Rush of 5G	February 14, 2019 5:00 AM
The Dialogic BUZZ UC Platform Swiss Army Knife	October 24, 2018 5:00 AM
DialogicONE - IoT Solutions	October 22, 2018 5:00 AM
Dialogic PowerMedia MRF – A Solution You Can Depend On	September 25, 2018 5:00 AM
Enabling WebRTC with the Dialogic PowerVille Load Balancer	July 16, 2018 5:00 AM
Telecom Meets Digital: The Importance of Establishing Controls	May 24, 2018 5:00 AM
Introducing DialogicONE!	April 6, 2018 5:00 AM
Small Enterprises Dominate But are Unified Communications Solutions Meeting Their Needs?	November 30, 2017 5:00 AM
Machine Learning Is Improving IVRs	November 29, 2017 5:00 AM
Call and Talk to Watson	November 21, 2017 5:00 AM