Is UC Losing Relevance?
Is UC Losing Relevance? by Jon Arnold
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been to a few different telecom events, both here in Canada and the U.S. While every event has a different focus, I’m just not seeing as much on UC as I would have thought. I say this not just in absolute terms – in relation to what else is out there – but also relatively – compared to say, a year ago.
Most of my time was spent at the ITExpo in Miami, and while there certainly were UC sessions, other topics seemed to get more attention. In fact, two of the sessions I moderated were about UC, and I’ll get to that shortly. Anyone attending recent ITExpos will know that their scope of programming keeps getting wider, making it hard for any technology to stand out. Fair enough, but in scanning over the program, or walking the show floor, or talking to people in hallways, other topics seem to be more prominent.
What was registering more for me? For starters, the very murky catch-all worlds of cloud, hosted and virtualization. There seems to be an endless fascination with this, and while most of it is justified, it’s not well understood, and not enough questions are being asked. We know this space holds a lot of promise for UC, but it’s just one of many applications/solutions that seem headed up that way.
Other themes that I was seeing and hearing more about than UC included mobility – which comes in many flavors at ITExpo (3G, 4G/LTE, Super WiFi, white spaces, etc.), security, session border controllers, video and plain old telephony. Of course, all of these have UC storylines, but this didn’t seem to be a big focus from what I saw.
To be fair, ITExpo is a fairly conservative show, so it wasn’t surprising to see so many sessions and so many exhibitors talking about IP phones, cordless phones, IP PBXs, headsets, 911 services, call termination, call recording, etc. Telecom is still a big world, and very little of this had anything to do with UC. That’s actually a good thing for UC, since the value proposition is about moving communications forward instead of dwelling on replicating legacy telephony with IP.
However, that is the state of the nation at ITExpo, and it’s important to note that the entire business world isn’t moving in lockstep with the UC vendors. Avaya is trying really hard to fix that, as they had the most visible presence at the show, with a lot of focus on how UC, Aura, Flare and video aren’t that hard to use and can deliver solid value to businesses.
Fair enough, but let me come back to my UC sessions. One was about the business case, and the other was on the role of social media. The former validated some interesting challenges, and that session was another indication of how telecom-centric most people’s thinking is around UC. There certainly is a business case to be made for UC, and we had tangible examples of Opex savings, travel reduction, less time wasted with missed calls, voicemail, managing messages, etc.
There is definitely a good-news story here, but it really dwells at a pretty low level for what UC does best. We certainly talked about the higher-order applications around collaboration and CEBP, but my sense is that cost-savings rule, and anything beyond this is a bonus. By the way, this was exactly the impression I got the following week at my Canadian events.
I’m saving the best for last as I segue to my second UC panel – social media. We all know this presents a host of challenges that IT didn’t sign up for, and is only being exacerbated by the runaway train called BYOD. My view is that there won’t be a business model or credible ROI for social media any time soon, and somehow we just have to roll with it. This is a bit like trying to tell a teenager what to do – you’d like to think you can, but it hardly ever works.
What I found most interesting about this panel was how much everyone talked about social media, but how little they talked about UC. To me, this was consistent with the context I saw UC around the other themes mentioned earlier at ITExpo. In other words, UC is in the conversation, but it’s not at the center. People are talking about UC in terms of mobility, video, telephony, contact center, etc., but not as a core driver or value-add. In this context, I think it becomes difficult for businesses to see UC as a solution that not only makes all these things better, but how it adds cumulative value by integrating them into a common landscape.
I think this goes a long way to explaining why the UC value proposition has been slow to catch on, especially since other things are now being adopted more quickly. Smartphones, tablets, video and social media are all gaining rapid traction, mainly because their value propositions are very easy to understand. Sure, they all pose challenges for IT, but that’s not stopping their adoption. Social media in particular is a concern, and I haven’t heard anyone else express my view on this. Quite simply, I’m concerned that whatever productivity gains we get from presence and integrating all our messages on the desktop will be offset by time wasted using social media for fun. Most businesses don’t have viable policies in place for social media, and for all the good it can do to enhance UC, I think it will pale in comparison to how people actually use it.
To sum up, the past two weeks have been a bit of a reality check for where UC registers in the minds of businesses and channels, and my sense is that it’s losing ground relative to where the vendors think it should be. Other trends are moving more quickly, and if they start to shift behaviors and traffic away from where UC is currently positioned, the vendors will have a lot of catching up to do.