Nick Jones

There, at last I said it. To me UC is an inadequate and ill-assorted bundle of arbitrary technologies which have been labelled as such so vendors can lock you in to their proprietary platforms and sell a big bundle of stuff instead of a little bundle of stuff.

Communications is by its nature fragmented not unified. There are dozens of ways to communicate, many of them like SMS, MMS, virtual worlds, twitter and social networks have nothing to do with UC.

Communications decisions are made in a distributed way by a community, not a centralised way by a corporation. Different tasks involving different communities need different types of communication.  So even if you invest in a UC solution there will be lots of communities both inside and outside the corporation who won’t use official channels and tools. And new communication channels and tools will arrive faster than the megavendors can absorb them into their UC bundles.

Unification of all these disparate communications channels and habits isn’t going to happen. Abandon those grand unified visions and look for something tactical and useful. Maybe lightly integrated communications is achievable, with several tools at least running on the same device. And for appearances sake you can wrap a bit of visual sugar coating around similar technologies, e.g. like unified inboxes for mail and SMS or Trillian wrapping multiple IM systems.

Communications is far too important to be unified by centralised decisions. We need more ways to communicate and more diverse ways to communicate, not inadequate unification. And I feel better for airing this partial, prejudiced but not entirely ignorant opinion, despite the fact I’m now hated by several colleagues and a collection of the largest vendors in the IT industry.