The Commodization of Unified Communications

[Podcast]
Last week's blog was my first attempt at blogging on the go. I typed it up on my Nokia smartphone while sitting at the skating rink. It was actually pretty easy to upload it directly to my blog site. Kudos to blogger.com for nailing the usability factor!

This week I got to thinking about a relatively new topic, reflecting on where enterprise technology is today and where it's going. Unified Communications (UC) has become such a common way of describing the current evolution of everything from IP telephony to video. When UC really took off in mainstream enterprise discussions it relegated IP Telephony to a commodity-based conversation. To use IP Telephony as a term today sounds so legacy. Now it's all about UC. But is Unified Communications suffering the same fate? Has UC become commoditized? Is it time for a TRANSITION to a new form of UC? I believe the answer is yes to all three.

Consider this - last year Microsoft spent approximately $250M on marketing Unified Communications. This was great for the industry in general but, in my mind, really sealed the fate on UC as a commodity. All the major UC players (traditional and emerging) have had a hand in this - some more than others:

• Microsoft has been positioning it's Unified Messaging solution as "free" and most of their conversations with customers focus on codecs and front-ending existing legacy PBX's (sound familiar?). Also thanks to Microsoft, the term "VoIP" has been revived from the dead and is now being associated with UC.
  

• Nortel basically gave away the farm to Microsoft in their attempt to stay relevant. Word out of VoiceCon this year is that Microsoft spent more time talking about it's relationship with Avaya than it did about the ICA with Nortel.

• Cisco could be accused of some commoditization of UC as well. If you include call control in the definition of UC, one could argue that they've commoditized UC by embedding so much of it into the network and positioning it as just another network service.
  

• Google is moving into the enterprise space with their unique "free" business model (though they haven't crossed into UC yet...but they are close with their mobile phone initiatives).
  

• Avaya - A recent headline I came across reads:

  "Avaya banks on recession to push cheap comms kit"

  Here's an excerpt from the article, "Avaya has launched a bargain basement version of its unified communications offering which is aimed to appeal to customers worried about the economic downturn."

The Avaya article mentions a cost of $0.15 /user/day...to be fair it also references a Cisco UC offering of $0.32 /user/day (to my point earlier). Regardless, it's clear to me that something has to change. Unified Communications, as we know it today, is on it's way to becoming the next legacy technology just like its predecessors - IP Telephony, VoIP, and Digital TDM and Analog.

Next week's blog will focus on the next generation of UC and it's tight linkage to Web 2.0. Perhaps in it's next iteration we'll start calling it UC 2.0...or not!