If this is starting to sound like the proverbial three blind men and the elephant, that's because it is. The exact definition of unified communications is in the eye of the beholder -- and vendors all have different perspectives.

“As collaboration in the workplace becomes increasingly important, companies are looking for rich communications tools to help them work more effectively. Unified communications is all about streamlining the ways we communicate. It’s about more personalized business communications,” says Wael Abdulal, Business Development Manager, MEA –Unified Communications, Cisco.Nortel offers a slightly different spin. Unified Communications, according to the company, is the unification of presence, real-time communications (IM, telephony, video and application sharing) and near-real-time communications (email, voicemail, short message services) into a single environment, whether at the employee’s desktop or when mobile on private and public networks. “Unified Communications brings together IP Telephony, real-time multimedia, mobile and fixed desktops, and business process integration to eliminate delays impacting personal, workgroup and enterprise productivity,” says Hassan Hamadani, Middle East Marketing Manager, Nortel.

Avaya’s vision of Unified Communications unites communications like telephony, conferencing, email, voice mail, instant messaging, video, and collaboration across a variety of user interfaces and devices. Avaya integrates these applications and systems reliably and securely to bring powerful, intuitive communications tools to our customers’ mobile staff. “A critical element of Avaya’s unified communications strategy is our ‘one number’ approach that enables all communications to go to the desktop, office phone, or mobile – basically extending the enterprise voice application to the platform that you need,” says Roger El-Tawil, Channel and Marketing Director, Avaya Middle East and North Africa.

Unified industry

Major Unified Communications vendors are now pushing for interoperability and standards by forming broad industry alliances. Cisco has recently announced a unified communications partnership and promised to deliver integration among their products including real-time clients and back-end servers, as well as an open-client framework for developers.

The pair said it would combine efforts from the IBM/Lotus UC2 Client Platform and communication and collaboration products from both companies in an announcement made at the VoiceCon show in Orlando. Those products include Lotus Sametime, Lotus Expeditor, Cisco Unified IP Phones and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace. “We are looking to provide to provide the front-end and back-end tools needed to support real-time communication via voice, video and text,” says Abdulal.

Nortel has joined hands with Microsoft for delivering jointly developed product bundles that combine e-mail, instant messaging, telephony and other communications technologies. “The Nortel and Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance is a broad and deep alliance that extends beyond integration and interoperability, to development cooperation, patent cross licensing, and a joint-go-market approach for sales and marketing. This innovative alliance provides the foundation and confidence boost to our customers that here is a partnership serious about delivering the very best user experience today and in the future,” says Hamadani.

The road map, laid out by the two vendors as part of a development and marketing alliance set up last July, includes several offerings that are scheduled to be rolled out later this year. For example, they plan to deliver an "integrated branch" appliance that incorporates both Nortel and Microsoft technology to provide voice-over-IP and other communications capabilities for remote offices.

So far, the growth of UC services has been impeded by a lack of a consistent programming environment. Now, vendors are looking to overcome that hurdle as well. “Unified Communications is becoming a software application that can be integrated into business applications to eliminate human delays. Enterprises have already invested billions of dollars in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this way, Microsoft's and IBM’s ecosystems of millions of developers can be leveraged to deliver communications-enabled business processes and accelerate the transformation of the enterprise,” says Hamadani.

“Standardized integration protocols (SIP) are being put together by the IETF (Internet Engineering task force) – this is enabling different vendors to integrate at a lower cost, which benefits the end user. In order to foster integration, Avaya is working with the developer community by extending some of its most popular features into the environments of other key technology providers,” says El-Tawil. Interfaces are available to Avaya’s communication servers in IP telephony, messaging, and conferencing, and Avaya also supports standards and integrates its offerings with solutions from the likes of Microsoft and IBM.

Cisco says its industrywide unified communications and collaboration platform, being developed jointly with IBM, will entice will entice a large number of developers to design communications services for the enterprise.

In the first step toward that end, IBM and Cisco have pledged to base the new platform, called UC2 (Unified Communication and Collaboration), on Eclipse and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) technologies.

In addition, both companies unveiled a series of upcoming offerings jointly developed by the two companies using an open set of APIs from Lotus's Sametime collaboration application and communication APIs from Cisco.

Among the solutions planned for later this year are click-to-call and voice mail integration to allow Sametime users to send instant messages to and from Cisco Unified IP phones. Another jointly developed offering will include federated presence information, call history conferencing, and video telephony. The federated presence solution will take information stored in Cisco's IP network, such as availability and location, and share that information with a Sametime client.

While all this bodes well for the Unified Communications market, enterprises looking to deploy this new technology need to simplify their operational environments in order to free up resources to leverage transformational opportunities. “Up until recently, service providers have been deploying end-to-end MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks as the foundation of their converged public networks, and promoting MPLS-based Virtual Private Network (VPN) services for enterprise customers. However, enterprise networks are at risk because service providers are being challenged by the complexity of planning, evolving, scaling and operating MPLS networks,” says Hamadani.

“To have true Unified Communications, you first need to unify the address of all of your devices – today you have a single phone number and a single email address. The second step is linking corporate voice services with their desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes,” says El-Tawil. The third element is fully unifying deskphones with mobile handsets – this is fixed-mobile convergence. which enables users to switch back and forth between devices and use features like conferencing, transfer, muting – stretching the enterprise voice capabilities to the mobile handset.

However, the term unified communications is just a buzzword if there is no roadmap to lead corporate users to this new tech nirvana which promises to create a new kind of knowledge worker. For the enterprise, unified communications is the next step in creating a more efficient, 'always on' business environment. It means migrating from traditional communications to convergence, and finally unified communications, the tech ideal that takes collaboration to the next level.