Conflicting strategies aired at unified comms show

Delivering the opening keynote, Quocirca analyst Rob Bamforth warned delegates to cut through vendors' marketing hype around UC. He said IT departments should establish suppliers' heritage before buying and try to understand what each of them is offering beyond simply touting cost savings.

Bamforth outlined how many companies have come from a hardware background — either in IT or telecoms — and how some have come from a services background. Their background affects their motives as to how they tell businesses to deploy UC, he said.

For example, Cisco, which has a network heritage, encourages customers to focus on retaining the network as a platform, whereas Microsoft believes control should come from the desktop. Telecoms service providers often preach an entirely different approach by saying that as much equipment as possible should be hosted in their network.

The result is that the market is now in a state of "collision", Bamforth said, with a huge number of service and product offerings, which is becoming more and more complex to understand.

Businesses must take control of UC on their premises, he said, and should be wary of technologies being brought in by individual employees.

The analyst said there should be a clear focus on the business benefits, and not too much thought about the technical elements. "My concern is that people might look at it and say 'We did this, but what did we get for it?'"

He concluded that the decision to roll out UC has to be taken sooner or later. "If you want to move forward, you need to invest," he said. "It is going to cost money to move to a unified communications infrastructure."