Ken AgressMy very first blog post asked “What’s it Mean to be ‘Unified’ in the First Place?” While this isn’t a particularly surprising question, it is interesting that in the past week I’ve had a number of conversations that raised this question again. Even more interesting, these conversations weren’t with my clients or vendors, but discussions with other analysts. The conversations basically broke in to one of two themes:
- For something to be called “Unified Communications,” the client that’s running should cover the “major” media that comprise a suite of UC interactions. For example, a client for a smartphone shouldn’t be considered “unified” if it doesn’t include e-mail and instead relies on the native client that comes bundled with the operating system.
- Alternatively, for a service to be considered a part of the “unified” landscape, it needs to offer compelling service for at least one of the major media that UC typically includes. For example, an e-mail only service could be considered a part of UC if it supplies services of sufficient quality to fill the e-mail needs of an enterprise that is deploying UC across this and other media.
It shouldn’t be surprising that I disagree with both of these views given my earlier post. The first view focuses too heavily on the capability of the client, almost ignoring the need for some central service to coordinate interactions as clients request presence information, initiate interactions, transition between media, and adds new participants or types of media to the session. The second view implies to me that the focus should not be on that central, coordinating service, but on the capabilities and strengths of the individual media, products, or constituent services that make up a broader UC solution.
Both of these discussions highlight why I think it critical to look at the core of the UC solution as defining “UC” rather than either the client or the constituent parts. The goal of UC is to enable multimedia interactions within context for the users involved while simplifying the process of transitioning between or adding new media to a particular session or conversation. A focus on the client eliminates the need for a central service (or suite of services), and particularly eliminates the need for interactions supported by industry standards on common protocols. The focus shifts to the capabilities of the developer of a given client, which theoretically eliminates the need for consolidated presence or standardized means of reporting communications capabilities or states among different media. A focus on the individual media without considering how well that media integrates into a larger multimedia environment does much the same – it ignores the importance of the unification in favor of an individual media.
Philosophically, I think this is an important point, and one that enterprises should consider when evaluating a platform that bills itself as “unified.” If a platform can’t support multiple media (even if it doesn’t bundle all of those media into a single solution) or relies on customized clients to connect otherwise disconnected services, then it’s important to question what this means from a UC governance and management perspective. How can the enterprise obtain a common view of availability, presence, or capability? How will appropriate rules for interactions (which may be driven by privacy, regulatory, or compliance concerns) be monitored and enforced? How will the enterprise extend this environment beyond the customized platform or single service to include richer forms of interaction, automation, or application-enablement?
Attempting to define UC from the client or an individual service perspective strikes me as the story of the blind men examining the elephant – since each is touching a different part of the elephant’s body, their conclusions as to what the elephant really is misses the larger picture of the elephant. And for UC, we should avoid this – the utility that UC delivers doesn’t rest upon the comprehensiveness of the client, but on the ability of the service to adapt to particular clients or capabilities. So long as e-mail is available from the client, it’s relatively immaterial if it’s supported by a disparate application so long as the service can direct communications to either according to the user’s requirements. Both a client and a service capability focus lack the “glue” that truly makes UC unified – a service that is capable of helping users or applications reach other users or applications using the most appropriate method of communication within a business context. That’s the “glue” that creates the unification of different products and services and coordinates the activities of the different client applications, communications services, collaboration services, and applications to deliver the right mix of media at the right time.
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