UCC, UC and Collaboration - Clarity and Reinforcement Courtesy of Avaya and Gartner

The Avaya.com home page is featuring replay of a Webinar they hosted on the topic of “People-centric Collaboration.” Bern Elliot, Research VP at Gartner, was the guest presenter, speaking about Unified Communications and Collaboration. His presentation is very worth watching; click here to register and view. The presentation can be downloaded while watching the webinar (button at bottom of screen).

Bern’s fourth slide is the point of this post. The headline is “UCC: Junction of 2+ Markets.” UCC is shown as a large oval space in which a smaller oval is placed at the left listing the “Communications” elements of UCC (i.e. the UC market).  The reason Bern says 2+ markets is that even the Communications oval contains more than one market category. 

• In one column is a list of voice and video communication functions: Telephony, Voice Mail, Audio Conferencing, Unified Messaging (note: at least the telephony portion of UM), and Video Conferencing. As Bern points out, these functions have primarily been delivered as part of the voice telephony market sector. He also includes Call Centers in that list due to the association of call centers with voice and the relationship between call centers and UC. 
  
  
• In the other column is a list of text and information-based communication tools: E-Mail, Web Conferencing, Instant Messaging, and Presence. These functions, of course, have primarily been delivered as part of the desktop and office productivity software market sector. He also includes Directory in this column, since that function is usually delivered by these same vendors and is closely associated with these communications tools, especially E-Mail and Instant Messaging. 

In the larger UCC oval, but outside of the Communications oval is a list of functions named Collaboration. 

• The Collaboration column includes these functions: Team/Shared Workspaces; Wikis, blogs, filtering; Social software and analytics; Expert location and context-aware applications; Collaborative/real-time authoring; Other collaboration tools.

All of this is placed in the context of four generations of use cases, pointing towards a communications future which is more community-based, more collaborative, and using more social networking tools.

You can watch the webinar and review the slides at your convenience.

One message from the webinar is that Gartner is reinforcing points we have been making here at UC Strategies for at least two years now. For example, our UC eWeekly (the UC eWeekly is a joint project between the UCStrategies team and Enterprise Connect/NoJitter.com) for December 14, 2010, “Decoding Collaboration for Effective Decision Making” highlights collaboration as a business process that is as much about the information being shared and the knowledge being created as it is about the underlying (unified) communications tools that those with collaborative use cases require. The UC eWeekly of December 16, 2009, “A Rose by Any Other Name” recommends looking at the results being delivered by Unified Communications and not being swayed by the aggressive re-branding efforts of most IP telephony vendors as they seek a share of the collaboration pie. As pointed out in the article, there’s a reason that Gartner publishes three separate Magic Quadrants for Corporate Telephony, Unified Communications, and Collaboration/Content Management.  There’s a separate Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, too.  (You can see these on the Microsoft reference document site for Analysts.) 

A collaboration-centric view of this topic was offered on June 26, 2009, in “Unified Communication and Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise” posted on NoJitter.com. The article reviews the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston (a sister UBM event to Enterprise Connect – then VoiceCon – focusing on the collaboration software providers and customers). Clearly, the theme of integration of social software with collaboration tools was already visible. Also, collaboration tools were already being packaged as “portals” in which people do their work in the context of information and community. The closing paragraph of that article anticipates Bern Elliot’s message when it says, “What might all of this mean for us? In the past ten years, communications suppliers were often asked about integration of their products with mail, contacts and calendars in Exchange or Domino; in the next ten years, expect integration with collaborative workspaces and social networks, too.”

Of course, the distinctions between voice/video communications, text/information communications, and collaboration are the basis for the three different UC options (extend voice, extend desktop, and extend applications) which we have presented at Enterprise Connect (VoiceCon) and Interop since 2007. We will be expanding that discussion at Enterprise Connect 2012 to include the three variations of each option – on-site, cloud-based, and hybrid. We hope to see you there to continue the dialog.

I encourage you to watch this webinar and download the presentation. It provides some needed clarity on the distinctions between UC and C in the brave new world of UCC.