Unified Communications Comes of Channel Age

One of the historic problems with unified communications is how disjointed this set of technologies has really been. Most customers are really still unsure what it means to unify their communications and the various components of unified communications solution don’t always work so seamless together.

But at the same time, interest in increasing the productivity of the existing workforce through the better use of IT is on the rise. The question is how can solution providers best leverage unified communications to meet the needs of customers while simultaneously advancing their own business goals? The answer to that question is to start thinking more like a carrier that is delivering set of services that have been customized for a specific customer.


We all know that every major carrier is looking to expand their footprint in unified communications. But the issue these big carriers will have over time is their inability to customize these services. As unified communications evolve in the enterprise, customers are going to want to see these services delivered inside the applications they use every day. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to provide custom unified communication services as a managed service to the customer.

To pull that off, however, solution providers are going to need to deploy a suite of products based in industry standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that by definition creates an open architecture. For example, it’s the maturity of SIP that enabled Siemens to replace Tandberg with Polycom as its preferred partner for the video conferencing component of the OpenScape unified communications platform. That same approach has also allowed Siemens to make a case for layering its software in on top of existing Nortel infrastructure rather than just assuming those customers will become customers of Avaya in the wake of the latter company buying the enteprise assets of Nortel, said Michael Garland, head of the North America channel for Siemens Enterprise Networks.

As time goes on, SIP will be extended to integrate with a host of service-oriented architecture (SOA) services, as promised this week separately by Avaya and IBM, that will allow unified communications to be delivered seamlessly across public and private cloud computing implementations.

In the meantime, unified communications represents one of the best opportunities for solution providers to inset themselves inside the business processes of their customers. And as we’ve said before, whoever controls the business process controls the customer.

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