Unified communications

Research has shown consistently that the major bugbear of IT managers about unified communications is perceived cost.

The breaking down of computing

The breaking down of computing and communications silos along with the provisioning of new devices and software, not to mention cultural barriers and the need for worker training, can quickly amount to a dauntingly expensive task.

Gartner estimates that about 99 per cent of UC deployments to date have been on-premise, nevertheless that this figure is likely to fall dramatically as more and more organisations catch on to the lower cost and ease of deployment of unified-communicationsas-a-service.

The Gartner Symposium in Sydney

Last November at the Gartner Symposium in Sydney, the analyst group hosted a roundtable discussion with the theme, "Is unified communications the biggest scam since Ponzi?"

"There was a full house," recalls Gartner's Johnson, with the front two rows taken up by nervous looking representatives from several large vendors.

The confusion

Johnson says that the confusion and uncertainty about the definitions and goals of unified communications is reflected in the fact that very few organisations today have what could be described as a coherent strategy.