As technology in business graduates from the legacy systems to more advanced cloud based services, it is easy to lose track of the number of new technologies your business has adapted. For example, the communication between the various stakeholders in a business today happen through telephone, email, instant messages, social network and several other emerging medium. Unlike an email-only set-up, a defragmented structure as this makes it difficult to seamlessly navigate through the timeline of discussion between two parties.
It is here that Unified Communications comes into practice. To put it simply, Unified Communications (UC) is a basic integration of all forms of communication in business that will ensure speedy turnaround time and a general improvement in efficiency of communication. Let us take a real world example – suppose you have a customer call you for a tech related support for which you do not have an answer. A typical response would be to tell the customer that you would call back and then go fetching for the right solution from your colleague who knows the answer. With UC, you could immediately look for a colleague who can answer the question and route the call to this person. This ensures that the turnaround time for the task is brought down from several hours to a matter of minutes.
With the collaboration tools available today, it is quite easy to integrate most parts of official communication. For instance, Google Apps for Business integrates tools like email and chat. With Microsoft having acquired Skype and Yammer, it is expected that the company could soon integrate the popular VoIP solution and business microblogging platform with Outlook to integrate emailing with the other forms of business communication.
There are two advantages to this. Firstly, UC ensures that the logical flow of conversation between two people is kept seamless regardless of their navigating from one form of communication to another. Secondly, it is simpler to look up archived data since the timeline of communication across various communication platforms can be more easily established.
Unified Communications is still evolving and it will be a while before we see the true benefits of this technology. For instance, it is still not possible to seamlessly route a voice call to an email system where it can be read textually. Worse, the technology is still unable to consistently route calls from a hosted VoIP system to a regular land line. However, the benefits of IP networking and UC as it is today is still a significant leap from the technology that existed a decade or two back. Consequently, there has been a wide scale adoption of Unified Communications technology across business sectors; including the government and public sector organizations.
According to a study by Infonetics Research, a lot of new businesses are moving towards UC. They found that more than 87% of the surveyed enterprises planned to bring videoconferencing into their UC architecture by 2014. In addition to this, close to 22% of the respondents were noted to have deployed their UC system on a private cloud with another 19% having deployed the same on a public cloud. These results point us to a future where most of the communication systems would be on a cloud where they are integrated with other communication forms. Do you think UC is an integral part of the future of business communications? Tell us what you think in the comments.