Let’s look at Unified Communication (UC) from the eyes of three different players:

1) Infrastructure:

• Telecom Infra: Avaya/Nortel/Ericsson/Alcatel
  Let’s take the Telecom infra companies. Their premise for UC is that they have owned Telecom all along and they know what communication is about. ISDN in some sense was their version of UC. They have been doing this for years and it is only natural that the next generation of communication would be best understood by them. It is all about ‘consumer communication’ to them.
  Network Infra: Cisco/Juniper

• The Network Infra players have a different idea. Their argument is if you say that ‘IP’ is going to be the platform for communication in the years ahead, who else is better equipped to handle this than the ‘data’ players.
  
  When John Chambers quipped that video adoption would increase the need for more bandwidth and hence more revenue for Cisco, he was signaling the intentions of the network infra players. To them, the next generation communication is all about the ‘pipe’.

2) Enterprise Software: Microsoft/Oracle

How would a road warrior be effective in achieving his goals? How do we make it easier for enterprises to communicate? For these companies, such questions are relevant in today’s world. For them, UC is about ‘business communication’.

3) Web 2.0: Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Skype
And finally, the Web 2.0 folks. They believe that they are the ones that heralded next generation communication via applications that connect people. Social networking/Instant Messaging/Blogging/Micro-blogging have connected people in a major way in the last few years and they think they deserve to be the champions in UC. They don’t care too much about the network. For them ‘applications’ make UC.

Levels of Convergence >>

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