Driving business value with unified communications

We are at the tipping point within voice and unified communications technology today.  At VoiceCon in San Francisco this summer, I walked around and took in the PBX systems and hardware devices that were made available from each vendor and all I could think was "Who cares?" 

I couldn't care less what PBX has this or that feature over another.  This technology is mundane and outdated.  Even the software-powered PBX story will be the same.  It's just not running on hardware anymore.  What I want to see exposed, what will actually make a difference to people is how the technology can be integrated, how it can affect the business applications they use today and how an organization's business processes that set them apart from their competitors will be able to leverage UCC (yes, UC and Collaboration, not just voice) technology to expose their uniqueness internally and through a federated and to-customer environment.
 
What is annoying to me is that now that software manufacturers are fully into the communications market it seems that some of the reps and consultants there are doing exactly what Cisco, Nortel, Shoretel, Mitel, Avaya, and others have been doing: comparing features.  The CEO of a company does not care about whether dual forking is obtained through two components or one.  The CEO of a company wants to know if he or she is saving money and will be impressed if the solution can integrate into the company's business strategy, the process, and the underlying applications that support this strategy that have been custom-built by an internal staff. 

Let's take an energy company for example.  My grandfather is an owner and operator of a multi-million dollar oil and gas company.  He doesn't care that Cisco requires Unified Mobility to enable dual-forking when Nortel enables it directly within the CS1000.  What he would care about is if we could take his telephony hardware, throw it away, cut his licensing out each month that he pays to the provider, outsource it to us, and on top of that build a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) solution that allows his engineers and analysts to survey a property that he wants to drill through before he drills. 

Through MOSS, we can integrate Unified Communications web parts that allow his team to collaborate on schematics, geo-data and historical information, and additional reports that would help make an informed decision about the investment.  Taking it a step further, we can integrate a solution that is speech-driven so that my grandfather, who is a quadriplegic, can just speak into the system without having to dial a number or type a message into a chat or IM window.  These are the solutions that drive business value.