UC Won't Last

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

UC Won't Last

I started working on a post last week I titled UC Won't Work. Today, there's a topic abuzz about how UC is a scam.

Speaking during a debate on unifiec communications at the recent Gartner Symposium in Sydney, analyst, Nick Jones, argued the case that unified communications is the "greatest scam since Ponzi", saying the technology had no clear definition. "I'll give you the real definition: Unified communications is the bundle of things a vendor wants to sell you," he said, according to NetworkWorld.

I have to concur. Everyone calls it something different. (see this YouTube video that XO did at VoiceCon with me).

It's like SIP - 35 opinions (RFC's) and no standard.

It's not a customer facing term. No customer asks for UC.

It's not a replacement service, which makes mass sales challenging (even expensive).

UC isn't one size fits all. (It's not cookie cutter). It's a forklift upgrade. It contains many moving parts. Scale will be difficult.

UC lies outside the comfort zone of both buyers and sellers. Think about it. It's a concept that you can't define for the prospect clearly. And in some cases, the vendor cannot deliver on the promise due to business process hurdles that handcuff the solution. Those hurdles can include security measures, regulations, policies, inter-departmental politics, and software integration.

Gartner's Jones remarks that UC doesn't integrate SMS, MMS, and social media (particularly Twitter) into one platform. Gen Y is leading the charge in the workplace, yet do not use any of the legacy communications platforms. So UC is becomes another wall. Walled gardens are what telecom has traditionally been about. "If you put fences around people, you get sheep." ~William McKnight, CEO of 3M



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