Guide to Unified Communications
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Integration, centralization come to unified communications
Efficiency is the goal
By John FontanaCertainly the prevailing trend driving unified communications, along with its instant messaging, presence and unified messaging sub-categories, is integration of the pieces into a single platform provided either by one vendor or built using tools from a variety of vendors and held together with standard protocols or Web services interfaces. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the SIP for IM and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) are two marquee communication integration technologies, but Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is also an accepted open protocol made popular by the Jabber Project and the commercial instant messaging vendor of the same name.
These protocols could eventually help do for unified communications what SMTP did for unifying disparate e-mail platforms. The goal of integration, however, has fostered another trend around management and content control, driven in large part by federal regulations that have spawned compliance, logging and auditing requirements and the corresponding tools.
Another major trend is how to centralize presence information that is logged by many different types of unified communications tools into one single authoritative source. The centralized platform means each application under the unified communications umbrella gets the exact same information. Also key is the need to define message relevance and context as communication flies around among applications.
Increasingly, open source tools are becoming options for key roles in IM, presence and unified messaging. Corporate IT would be remiss in not evaluating these options.
But the most important trend is integration with business processes and enterprise applications. Communications without a purpose is mostly just chatter and experts agree that the sweet-spot of this emerging communications trend is to provide efficiencies in order to close business and book revenue.
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