Unified Communications - a vision from the snake oil salesmen

I've been reading a report from one of the major IT market research firms on what they (and many others) call Unified Communications. They are refreshingly rude and realistic about the state of unified communications today (everyone is evaluating but nobody is deploying, standards are ill-defined, it is unclear which vendors will end up on top, benefits in hard financial terms are difficult to define). However they paint an overly rosy picture of Unified Communications by 2015.

There is overwhelming marketing hype over unified communications and it obscures how communications works. I prefer to think about Integrated Communications. Today for most people integrated communications means email, address books, and calendar. I might want to use all of those in one interface, but it doesn't mean I'll stop using all my other communications tools.

New communications methods arise rapidly, seemingly out of nowhere - think of SMS, Facebook & Twitter. People adopt a new communications method because other people they want to talk to are already using it, not because it has come bundled with something else. Gradually more communication methods will be integrated into a single interface or available on the same device (a web portal or smartphone). This will happen slowly, as the vendors can't keep up with the pace. We should take a tactical, progressive approach. We will never reach the nirvana of Unified Communications that the industry would like to sell us.

There is remarkably little pushback against the unified communications marketing spiel, but there is some. Nick Jones of Gartner (not the research firm I mention earlier) is as ever insightful and refreshing: see his blog post I hate Unified Communications.