Unified Communications, what is it and where is it going?

I listened to a good talk yesterday at the Unified Communications show at Olympia. This talk was by Chris Wortt (EMEA Manager for VoIP at Polycom) and was about helping decision makers understand VoIP technologies and standards in order to develop a suitable communication strategy for their business.

Chris was a good speaker and managed to put across his beliefs as to what unified communications (UC) means and will come to mean very well. Particularly, he thinks that UC should encompass the ability to communicate and share information between people regardless of the distance between them or the device being used or the media type chosen.

The benefit to business of UC is rapid access to information and people which leads to improved efficiency and better customer service. One of the examples he used was to consolidate many instant messaging (IM) clients to one communicator; i.e. being able to start conversations with users of Windows Live Messenger or Skype or Yahoo all from the same client software. Certainly amongst my contacts each prefers to use different IM services and it becomes a pain to have them all open all of the time, so I could see his point.

To further the possibilities of consolidation Chris is an advocate of open standards (he may have other reasons too) such as SIP, HTTP, XML and open APIs. He did note that Microsoft's Office Communication Server (OCS), which is a proprietary system, is stirring things up in this arena too. I agree with both of these points, though I would like to point out that Gradwell (our VoIP platform provider) were successfully demonstrating integration between OCS and their SIP based VoIP platform at yesterday's show too.

Next, Chris sees adoption of UC as likely to be driven by UC phones. These should include video, voice, IM and CRM integration as well as being easy to use. (In fact there was a good example of a phone like this at the BNS Distribution Ltd stand with a new Grandstream video phone, due out in the next quarter or two, I liked it.)

What other things will affect adoption? Well Chris also believes that those of us who are getting used to high definition in the rest of our lives (HD TVs, BluRay DVD etc) will demand this same quality in our communications. He also believes this will be very beneficial to the users too, as, for example, wideband (Hi-Def) audio codecs (such as G.722 and G.719 Stereo) transmit far more of the conversation. Particularly for conversations with people with different accents this makes understanding each other much easier and makes conversations then run more naturally (source: Polycom's own experiences) and be less exhausting.

Increased use of high definition video and sound is also going to affect our network and bandwidth requirements. HD video will require between 1-2Mb/s of bandwidth per conversation. So Gigabit networks are going to be very necessary and anyone planning to use these services over wifi should be implementing 802.11n (preferably with 2 or more endpoints at a site) for their wifi networks.

Finally, Chris banged on about how we should get consumer level services (such as the superb user interface of the iPhone) in services aimed at businesses. To be honest this has been a frustration of mine too. Let's hope business technology products get more and more user driven!

There was more to his talk than that, but those were my favourite bits and the ones I felt were most important. Excellent.