The Names Have Been Changed to Confuse the Innocent
Posted by Campbell Williams | 10 Dec 2009
Category: Unified Communications
Our recently achieved Mitel Unified Communications specialistPARTNER accreditation has left me conflicted. This, along with our unified communications awards, the ongoing industry obsession with UC, and a flagrant desire to push up our Google page ranking, means I find myself having to bang on endlessly about "unified communications".
So what's the problem? I must confess: I hate the term and I always have. To borrow from Yogi Berra (for our American readers), "it's déjà vu all over again". I remember when I first started in the industry and I was wowed by demos of unified messaging. The problem came when we talked to customers: the industry got tied up in knots explaining what "unified messaging" meant, how it was different to "integrated messaging" and "voicemail", etc etc. The poor end-user would be sat there thinking "I don't care what it's called; how's it going to help me and my business". But no, we continued to ram the UM term down their throats.
The net result was that it was a resounding failure, shipments never reached anything close to analyst forecasts, and the industry scratched its collective head in mystery as it was (and is) a good product, perfect for the pre-BlackBerry era. My old mate, the writer Bob Emmerson, taught me something over 10 years ago when I was a young man: "a confused market doesn't buy, it waits". I've never forgotten that and it's never stopped being true. In short, the UM lesson is that the market was confused, didn't understand why one man's definition of the technology bore no resemblance to the next, the vendors got involved in a "my UM is real UM, his is not" battle, and nobody adopted the technology.
Sound familiar? UM evolved to become UC, and the industry is up to its old tricks. I've not heard two vendors (or resellers, or journalists, or analysts) give the same definition. And even a neat Gartner-esque articulation is several lines long. I spoke at a recent industry channel roundtable and, when prompted by the Chairman, the audience all reckoned that they'd seen no growth in unified communications in the last year. Yet, when prompted by me, almost all of them had seen growth in teleworking, mobile twinning, conferencing and collaboration, and the like. Isn't UC just an amalgam of these technologies?
I did a straw poll (admittedly unscientific!) of our sales and presales guys. Not one had ever had a business decision maker ask them for or about "unified communications". The people who knew the term tended to be IT people, especially those who are Microsoft (or Cisco) centric in their roles. Of the IT Directors who had heard the term, almost all didn't understand it and consequently didn't like it either.
And still, the "confusopoly" continues. Our friends at Avaya, Cisco and Mitel have changed the names of all manner of products in order to cram "unified communications" into the middle of them (even if the old products had, over many years, developed a brand and name recognition). This results in some ungainly and long product names which leads to the industry defaulting back to an old friend: the acronym! Cue mass confusion...
My highlight of the year was hearing about CUCIMOC. It's pronounced "cookie mock" which is spectacularly appropriate, as it really does take the biscuit. It stands for "Cisco Unified Communications Integration for Microsoft Office Communicator". I won't bore you with what it means - it does what it says on the tin - but doesn't that just beggar belief? Admittedly, there's not a "real" product called CUCIMOC but the expression "Cisco UC Integration" is a Cisco trademark, and the industry itself talks in this sort of language, and that inevitably filters down to the end-user.
Will we never learn? Unless we're talking about better project working, improving client service, eliminating travel, being there without going there, and all the stuff I try and talk about in Our Solutions, we're not going to get as far with UC as we should.
