VoIP and the Promise of Unified Communications

The idea of "Unified Communications" (UC) has been around for so long and encompasses such a broad variety of services that many people think of it as an abstract bloated concept, too far from reality to be meaningful. And they have a point. Many companies offer the nirvana of UC only to find that organizations just don't know how to work with it properly or do a poor job of implementing it. UC has many components and all of them have to take advantage of the synergies between them in order to provide a seamless communication experience.One good example of a UC is being able to tell when someone is available or not. A chat status of "green" merely means that the person is interacting with their system. They might be on a call and unavailable to chat, but since there's no interaction between the calling system and the chat application, they can still ignore your chat request. And this is just one of the large number of possible synergies between chat, voice, email, scheduling, and conferencing.
Of all these, VoIP is probably the heart of UC systems. It's possible for a VoIP provider to branch out into other areas and provide additional UC services far more easily than it is for others to suddenly start providing VoIP services. The complicated infrastructure, know how and configurations of VoIP systems make it the hardest link in the chain to forge. But one huge stumbling block in the UC model is the lack of integration between disparate systems. Of the various UC tools, only email has managed to seamlessly overcome this disadvantage. You can freely communicate with anyone no matter what email account you have and that's one of the reasons why email has turned out to be such a killer application.
The day we can all chat with each other regardless of which client we're using, or the day we can use VoIP to call one another without bothering about which service they're on is the time we would have taken a significant step closer to the dream of unified communications. The SIP protocol has been trying to achieve this with VoIP and has already become quite successful. But there are vested interests in the VoIP business who don't wish this integration to take place because they would rather leverage their large user base and become the de facto communication providers for everyone.
But with a bit of effort, we can achieve UC within an individual business since a standard can be enforced. And we need to start with VoIP as the backbone.
Bhagwad is an expert consultant on configuring Hosted VoIP Servers. He also specializes in the Implementation of HD Voice.

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