Eye on the Unified Communications Market

TechTarget’s SearchUnifiedCommunications site has launched a new feature called Eye on the Unified Communications Market. This monthly feature will take an in-depth look at a specific vendor to provide insight into that vendor’s approach to unified communications and the pros and cons of that approach. For this first month, the column focuses on Microsoft.

The column’s author, Blair Pleasant, points out that “There are several groups of players in the enterprise UC arena, all coming from different directions: the switch, enterprise IM and presence, messaging, mobile devices, conferencing/collaboration, applications and so on.”

Depending on the existing infrastructure and applications already in place, and the overall goal or objectives that an organization wants to accomplish by implementing UC, one approach or vendor solution may make more sense than another.

Organizations need to have an eye on the long-term future though as well. Making decisions purely based on the current architecture could paint the organization into a corner and handicap their ability to maximize their efficiency and productivity with unified communications. Consider your ultimate unified communications goal and work backards to define logical phases to get there rather than starting purely from where you are and expecting to someday get where you want to be. If you aren’t aiming at a target it is hard to predict where you will ultimately end up.