Unified Communications, or popularly known as “UC,” is being embraced by many organizations for its cost-effectiveness and flexibility. Already, many companies, who have adopted UC, have started reaping the benefits of this technology, and are enjoying greater collaboration, increased return-on-investment (ROI), improved organizational effectiveness, and significant cost reduction.
Elucidating Unified Communications
In general, Unified communications is an Internet-telephony technology architecture that is capable of integrating legacy and existing communication systems with productivity tools to deliver complete communication tools across multiple convenient applications and devices - by simply leveraging integrated servers, services and client applications.
UC breaks the barrier between telecommunications and computing. Due to the fact that it offers a single or unified solution for all kinds of communication, such as call, multimedia/cross-media message-management, it is referred as Unified Communications.
With the help of UC, a user can be more productive. Because, this unified technology offers features such as: dialing any telephone number to hear an e-mail message or calendar events; accessing an Outlook address book with only one click on a phone; dialing a number from the contact list by just calling out the name to the mobile phone; using a single phone number that can be provided to business partners, clients, customers and friends - for communication purposes; and many more.
The above features are just a part of real-life examples of usability of Unified Communications.
Basic Technology Involved
Unified communications primarily utilizes IP-based infrastructure, existing communication applications and collaboration software to unite disparate technologies such as fixed and mobile voice, e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced business applications like calendars and directories, IP-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, voicemail, fax, audio- video and Web-conferencing — all into a single environment.
All the above disparate technologies are first brought into real time and then coordinated to make it a unified solution.
Actually, the convergence of enterprise voice, video and data services and software applications lead to the birth of Unified Communications technology.
Benefits of UC
Apart from optimizing business processes and enhancing human communications, UC also reduces latency, managing flows, and eliminates device and media dependencies to increase the productivity of an individual or an organization as a whole.
This IP-based technology allows fixed-mobile convergence by equipping cell phones and smartphones with software applets, in order to allow the devices to extend its functionality. It helps organizations to reduce the amount of time required to schedule meetings, wait on hold, play phone tag and so forth. Users can communicate in real-time regardless of their geographic location.
In addition, UC not only enhances an organization’s IT manageability and security of instant messaging, but also simplifies video calling and streamlines audio- video- and Web-conferencing.
Furthermore, UC facilitates deployment of voice communications and helps to implement communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) that utilize events from business systems (reporting, databases, monitoring programs, GPS systems, cameras, etc.) to automatically trigger alert messages to the right worker(s).
Brands Available in the Market
Some of the global companies offering Unified Communication systems and services include Microsoft, Cisco, Corebridge, Zeacom, NEC, BroadSoft, and more.
Future of Unified Communications
According to a survey entitled “Unified Communications Tracking Poll,” conducted by CDW LLC, 58 percent of IT executives’ organizations implemented unified messaging as compared to 46 percent in the 2009 study and 45 percent deployed presence technology as compared to 37 percent in the 2009 study.
Ultimately, UC is slowly being adopted by many organizations around the globe and will drive the communications equipment and services market.
Jayashree (Hegde) Adkoli - Jayashree (Hegde) Adkoli is a freelance writer covering science and technology topics such as VoIP, IP communications, contact centers, ...
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