Collaboration Sphere
In There’s A Change Afoot, I wrote the unified communications conversation is changing from voice centric to collaboration centric. Usually I post things as a form a cheap therapy – it gets things of my mind and allows me to focus on important matters such as Seinfeld reruns. But this epiphany has been more stubborn. I keep seeing even more evidence.
The term should not be Unified Communications. It should be Effective Communications. In this IBM SameTime UC case study the accomplishment is a 40 percent reduction in calls. There are lots of ways to reduce calls, but the case study illustrates the difference between communications and effective communications.
Skype has made a lot of news lately and now claims to represent 25% of international long distance minutes. That’s an impressive statistic, but being a cynic about statistics (and dam lies), I thought about the measure… “minutes” instead of “calls”. Most telecom stats are in calls. Why does Skype talk about minutes instead of calls? I am guessing it is because of effective communications. Skype users tend to call each other when they are available. I use Skype heavily and nearly always IM before I call – I am sure Skype’s actual call stats are relatively low and unimpressive. Traditional callers make more calls, but have less effective communication – AKA voice mail.
The UC wild card that is emerging is collaboration.
Getting people in different places to work together – inexpensively, reliably, securely is where the shit hits the fan. This is where communications become effective. Remote workers spend too much time doing stupid things – like revision marks in a Word document. It is much more effective to discuss and make changes in real time. Sharing documents, presence, whiteboards, sharing screens, and even video chats – basically the goodies that come in a collaboration suite is where the money is – both in terms of sales and productivity gains.
Next week is IBM’s Lotusphere. The more I learn about the product, the more power I see in its architecture. Personally, I know Exchange/Lync and GoogleApps pretty well, but don’t have much familiarity with Lotus/Notes/SameTime. It will be great to hear what companies are doing with it. Plus, I understand Lotusphere is a top notch event. Immediately after isITExpo East and the Cloud Communications Summit – fortunately both events are in Florida. Also at ITExpo is Jon Arnold’s SmartGrid Summit, Larry Lisser’s StartupCamp, and this year the UCStrategies.com folks will be running a track at ITExpo as well.
By Dave Michels
Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.