By Richard Martin

To say that the Industry Address by Joe Burton, CTO for the Voice Technology Group at Cisco (CSCO) – to be delivered at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 22 at the VON Conference & Expo – comes at an interesting time, is an understatement. Unified communications has gone through several evolutions, and several cycles of the hype curve, in recent years, but the last 12 months have been a watershed for what many see as the critical enabling communications technology for enterprises in the next few years.

That last statement exemplifies the multiple interpretations that “UC” carries for different telecom players. Is it a single technology, or a set of related technologies that can be assembled and re-mixed to suit the needs of particular service providers and business users? Is it a platform or a set of features? Is it best served up as a prix fixe six-course meal, or from an a la carte menu?

And, finally, is it really a game-changer for businesses, as many vendors claim, or a convenient and sexy portmanteau marketing term for vendors and service providers?

“With enterprises of all sizes now deploying UC, our challenge is to demonstrate how to leverage this investment to improve organization processes and workflow with communications-enabled business processes (CEBP),” wrote Mark Pendleton, director of product marketing for NEC Unified Solutions Inc., in a recent blog on VON. It is safe to say that vendors, caught up in the enticing possibilities of presence, single-number find-me, and unified messaging features, have not done a thorough job in making that demonstration plausibly to potential purchasers. That goes for both on-premises versions and the rapidly growing category of hosted UC.

“One of the problems with measuring – and selling – hosted UC is there’s no agreement on its definition,” Khali Henderson wrote recently on PHONE+. “No standards body has swooped in to untangle the spaghetti of features, acronyms, jargon and marketing labels that now obfuscates UC.”

That doesn’t seem to be slowing growth much, particularly for hosted UC solutions, which, at least in theory, require less upfront cost and less maintenance headaches. Last summer Wainhouse Research predicted that hosted UC will grow from $200 million today to $1 billion in 2011 and more than $5 billion in 2014. Forecasts from Radicati Group Inc. are even more bullish: nearly $5 billion by 2013, including a 2009 estimate of $2.9 billion.

Meanwhile, in terms of vendor competition, UC will play a critical role in shaping the market in the near term. Avaya recently said it intends to pay more than $900 million for Nortel Networks’ (NT) enterprise solutions business, which includes Nortel’s unified communications technologies. Pending regulatory approval, the deal will give Avaya a 25 percent share of the enterprise telephony market, putting Cisco Systems, the traditional leader, in second place at 16 percent, according to analysts.

Few industry figures are better positioned to sort out these varying strands than Joe Burton. Over the last several years, Burton has led the development of many of Cisco's UC products, including MeetingPlace voice, video, and data conferencing products, IPVC video conferencing, IP Communicator, Unified Advantage, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, and the Unity Connection integrated voice messaging line. He also led the Cisco-wide Voice Systems Architecture group that coordinates standards development and architecture for all voice products, and he was the chief architect for Cisco's messaging products. He has a unique view on not only Cisco’s UC strategy but the evolving structure of the market – and the future of unified communications.