Unified Communications Defined

Despite all of the media hype, Unified Communications is not a new 2007 technology. The term Unified Communications has became a popular way of describing the continuing evolution of communications technology. An evolution enabled mostly by IP and related protocols and devices.

Many of the Unified Communications products that have emerged this past year were not new at all. Rather, in many instances the new products were nothing more than branding changes to an existing product line. This re-branding of an existing technology reminds me of a similar change that occurred in the mid 1990s. At that time, multi-port Ethernet bridges suddenly morphed into Layer 2 switches. Despite the widespread perception, there was nothing dramatically different between bridges and switches. At the time, I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and many of our customers and DEC sales representatives were concerned that we were missing the boat since we didn’t manufacture switches. Fortunately, DEC marketing was able to address this product gap literally overnight by renaming the DECbridge product to the DECswitch. And voila, we were in the switching game!

Microsoft’s release of OCS 2007 accelerated the awareness of the benefits of unifying communication services and devices but in my view, Unified Communications is simply the continuing evolution of IP Communications that was enabled by VoIP during the late 1990s; which later enabled IP PBXs and IP Telephony.  In fact, many of the attributes, devices and functionality attributed to Unified Communications are not new at all.  USB handsets, Softphones, Presence / Status / Availability, IM and Simultaneous Ring were all part of the Hosted IP Telephony services that I was helping Telus to develop in 2002.

So, despite what many marketing organizations would like us to believe, Unified Communications is not a new concept, nor is it a dramatic new technology breakthrough. I’m fine with calling the current state of IP Communications, Unified Communications. I’m reasonably confident that within a year or two, the term UC will be replaced with a new term that suggests something dramatically new.

With that little rant out of the way, what is Unified Communications and is there a succinct and accurate definition? I’ve seen many noble attempts to define UC, but I don’t like any of them. Most definitions are several sentences (or paragraphs) long and usually include multi modes, multi media, any device, any time, presence, filtering, availability, people, processes, applications, messaging, blah, blah.

The challenge is that most definitions are attempting to describe a concept or a point in time in the evolution of IP Communications. One can implement some aspects of UC, but saying that “we are implementing Unified Communications” is meaningless. It would be like saying “we are implementing Information Technology”.

So, here is my humble and likely inadequate definition of Unified Communications:

Unified Communications is part of the continuing evolution of IP Communications technology which automates and unifies all forms of human and device communications in context and with a common experience.

I welcome your suggestions for a better definition of Unified Communications providing it is less than three sentences!

Rick McCharles, IP Communications Consultant
RIC Services

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