Those Creeping Unified Communications

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New research on the adoption and deployment of unified communications suggests that most enterprises are still challenged by integrating needed applications with telephony platforms.

Nemertes Research, which just completed interviews with 117 end user organizations averaging $10 billion in revenue, said preliminary data showed that while UC projects are moving forward, the effort is still facing hurdles within most companies.

Unified communications ties instant messaging, e-mail, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), presence technology, as well as video and Web conference capabilities.

“About 99 percent of organizations have VoIP,” Irwin Lazar, Nemertes principle research analyst and program director, told InternetNews.com. “But many still don’t understand what UC is about and often confuse it with unified messaging,” he ad

While adoption is not moving at the speed of light, UC growth is likely welcome news to the many vendors cramming into the marketplace with full package solutions or pieces of the platform puzzle.

Those players run the gamut from the networking world with Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Shortel, to desktop players like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Lotus and IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Avaya (NYSE: AV) striving to gain ground. All are vying for what bodes to be a huge revenue pie given research firm IDC’s prediction that the market could total $17 billion by 2011.

Not only does every vendor have a solution, but most are partnering to boost offerings for competitive advantage.

The adoption avalanche, according to Nemertes, will happen once companies understand that today’s phone platform should be viewed as the UC foundation and as they figure out the business justification for funding.

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According to Gartner successful enterprises the project involves rethinking the delivery of voice, video, data, and collaborative applications, as well as the design architectures and organizations capable of supporting them.

“Right now all the vendors are kind of making the marketplace a bit muddy as they define UC differently which is adding to the confusion,” said Lazar.

Nemertes defines UC as the integration of real-time applications into communications, which means having chat, voice calls, online conferencing as well as innovative presence technology that helps users find needed experts in real time.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.