Catalyst Top 10: Unified Communications

Here is the next Top 10 list of things I heard at Catalyst 09. This list focuses on Unified Communications(UC):

1. Mobility is a critical enabler to the business and increasingly a critical part to selling UC to the business.


2. Be patient. Allow the UC market to continue to mature before making major UC investments.


3. “UC is not even close to mainstream adoption.”


4. Cloud-based services will likely play an incremental role in UC strategies.


5. Video conferencing is becoming much more integrated with web conferencing and telephony.


6. Integrating video conferencing between businesses is still problematic, due to lacking standards. However, some federation services are emerging. However, they require that the parties use some of the same platforms.


7. Communications-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) is nirvana. Standards, integrations, and ecosystems don’t yet exist to support rich CEBP. Recommendation: Make CEBP the goal and push your vendors to enable.


8. UC moved us from device centric, disjointed communications to person-centric, presence-aware, device-agnostic communications.


9. User access to UC functionality should exist within the applications where users live (email, business applications, UC platform interfaces).


10. The desktop is increasingly extended to mobile devices – Don’t forget mobility in your UC client strategy.

Look for one more post to wrap up my Catalyst learnings.