By Khali Henderson

For nearly a decade the term “unified communications” has also stood for “Wait Till Next Year.” No more. UC is here, but its exact definition is no clearer. A continuum of offers is shoved into the UC bucket as the industry begins to sort out its potential and challenges. The struggle to achieve a more perfect union of communications technologies is the subject of a track of education sessions at the VON Conference & Expo, Sept. 21-23, in Miami, entitled The Future of Unified Communications.

The task starts really with taking on the meaning of UC itself. Setting aside the delivery mechanism for the moment, there are competing philosophies about UC – those that come at it from a communications perspective and those that come at it from the business process perspective. Fortunately, these are not mutually exclusive, and more likely the former approach precedes the later, which seems to have greater legs long-term. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s first attempt to define UC. Based on interviews with industry experts, UC at a base level must include three elements — telephony, messaging and presence — integrated into a single interface. Beyond those core capabilities, consensus breaks down. The most common add-ons mentioned are mobility (i.e., fixed mobile convergence or FMC), collaboration and conferencing (including video), and integration with business software applications, such as CRM.

It’s easy to see how the competing philosophies come into play. The communications-centric view is contented with the basic elements while the business process advocates don’t want UC to stop at unifying pure communications. They want to communications-enable all applications for all workers in and out of the office. The business process efficiencies are the product, not the communications tools.

The former is enough for a lot of business today and, frankly, for the foreseeable future. But striving for the whole enchilada is a pursuit the industry is going to be perfecting for some time.

As the experts speaking at the VON Conference & Expo no doubt will address, the comingling of communications across platforms and devices and applications has far-reaching implications for business models, sales strategies, technology platforms, security and more. Moving UC – by any definition – into the cloud (a concurrent trend being discussed at VON Expo) further complicates the works.