In the June 19, 2008 VoiceCon UC eWeekly (a weekly newsletter jointly sponsored by VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com), Fred Knight asked the question, “Where’s the Beef?”

At first, I thought that Fred was losing faith on the directions for UC. But after reading his newsletter a couple of times, I decided Fred was basically raising a challenge, one of his most important roles across both the entire communications industry, especially as Co-Chair of VoiceCon. Fred had seen a very skeptical article in NetworkWorld, entitled, “Enterprises baffled by Unified Communications, survey finds.”

Fred’s challenge is to “prove” that Unified Communications is real, is understood by the customers, and has real value. So, I took his challenge and did my homework on the NetworkWorld article. My conclusion is that Forrester Research is off-target on this one - either they asked confusing questions in their survey or they tried to make UC-related conclusions from a survey that was really a “general purpopse survey on networking plans,” rather than on UC specifically.

But the homework of studying the NetworkWorld article did prove that UC is alive and well. The article links to an excellent definition of UC and to a survey based on that definition, in 800 telecom managers were very clear on the benefits of and reasons for UC. It also shows that audio and web conferencing (i.e. collaboratively sharing and discussing information) is the leading UC application at over 40% adoption, somewhat ahead of video conferencing and well ahead of IP PBX.

Anyway, I found plenty of beef, even to the extent that UC applications seem to be pulling VoIP rather than the other way around. If you’d like to read more, take a look a the entire post on NoJitter.com.

So, thanks, Fred, for the challenge. Improves all of our games, and the UCStrategies.com team likes to win!

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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Yesterday, June 4, VoiceCon hosted a great webinar, “Demonstrating UC Productivity Benefits”.  The webinar presented the findings of an important survey recently completed by Blair Pleasant and Nancy Jamison, both leading Market Analysts and both associated with UCStrategies.com. 

The survey focused primarily on the User Productivity category of UC (the UC-U) rather than that Business Process category of UC (UC-B), since the UC-U category is the one that is easiest to adopt and so has the largest early uptake. 

Blair and Nancy described the methodology of the survey and then focused on two major categories of their findings:

• 1. The quantitative results as to adoption and usage of UC-U. A graphic on slide 7 shows that 100% of those interviewed were using Presence and IM, with over 80% using click to call functions. Tagging, Web Conferencing and Video Conferencing ranked lower in use and/or adoption, as you can see.

• 2. The qualitative results as to where the benefits are being realized. There are some great examples that Blair and Nancy describe in five categories. Interestingly, these five categories are similar to the five UC Application categories described here and in a June 2007 BCR magazine article. You will learn a lot about the adoption by listening to this section.

You can hear the entire webcast, including a presentation from the sponsor, Genesys, by going to the VoiceCon webinar site (click here).  you will need to register, but then can get immediately to the replay.  You can also move the slider to hear a specific section, and for that, here’s a short index:

Minute   6:00   Survey Methodology
Minute   8:13   Findings Overview
Minute 11:00   Adoption Statistics
Minute 12:25   Business Impact Categories
Minute 14:50   Results by Impact Category

It’s worth the watch. Hope you enjoy it.  I’d welcome feedback as to what you think of the webcast.

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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Nancy Jamison and I just finished up a new study on UC productivity benefits, and will be presenting some of the key findings during a VoiceCon webinar on Wednesday, June 4, 2p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, sponsored by Genesys Telecommunications Labs. You’ll get to hear first hand about our findings – some of which were expected and obvious, some not so obvious (see my VoiceCon eWeekly newsletter about the “hidden” benefits of UC).

For the study, we interviewed real UC end users who use UC in their day-to-day jobs, examining how they use UC in their daily workflow, and how UC has made an impact. We spoke with executives/managers, operations (including IT and engineering), human resources, and marketing users to gain insights into if and how UC has made them more productive and effective at their jobs. They unanimously agreed that UC has made a critical impact on their productivity – in fact, 100% of those surveyed said UC has positively impacted the way they do business.

During the webinar, we’ll discuss the study’s key findings, and break down the results based on the ways in which UC helps workers, and then by job category. Jim Kraeutler of Genesys will also discuss how he uses UC to help him do his job more effectively.

The full study will be available on Friday, May 30 – check the UCStrategies.com home page under “In the Spotlight.”

To register for the webinar, go to https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=110311&sessionid=1&key=ACC1F5D9D5C310F94CE52CEEE627FF12&sourcepage=register

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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I had to contact a company’s customer service and technical support departments the other day - I won’t say the company’s name, but it rhymes with Pemantic. They don’t have a unified communications strategy. This was an extremely grueling experience, especially since I know that there’s better technology available, and that the technology used was implemented very poorly.

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Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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