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By Doug Allen

Unified Communications: so much potential, so much confusion. Not unlike cloud services, another space subject to great hype and hazy definitions, unified communications (UC) has become the darling of vendors, providers and industry pundits alike. Especially when it comes to hosted UC services.

But after talking to a clutch of hosted providers, CPE vendors and channel partners, it seems there is little consensus as to just what UC is, beyond a sort of lowest common denominator understanding of the service elements involved (voice, video, presence, collaboration, and messaging). After that, the sky’s the limit in terms of the functions integrated and how they’re accessed.

This of course leads to all kinds of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) for network managers and IT staff, who are interested in the technology, sure, but have lots of questions about implementation, and hey, do I really need all this stuff?

How else to account for the relative lack of customer adoption in UC for 2009, according to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, which found that, in contrast to a 30 percent spike in hosted IP telephony that year, “...[the concept of] unified communications continued to make inroads into enterprises, [but] it did not gain as much traction as originally anticipated. As a result, although many hosted service providers took 2008 to retrench and include more UC offerings in their portfolio, the market segment targeted by hosted services was not ready for unified communications, and UC adoption rates and revenue impact were minimal.” Yet the same report predicts UC (admittedly helped along by the inclusion of hosted VoIP) will top several billion dollars by 2015, largely driven by hosted or cloud service delivery models.

So UC is here to stay. But to return to my original point, how does the business customer, from SMBs to the large enterprise, decide on the right implementation for them?

This is where agents, partners, and VARs come in, because just like cloud services, UC – whether hosted, managed, premises-based,  or some combination of the three – will never truly take off as an all-purpose service without educating the customer on all the options and features available, and helping them understand just how UC tools can not only show a relatively quick ROI but more importantly critically impact business processes, speed communications and workflow, and improve customer interactions.

It’s not that this problem is unique to the UC space. But it’s the channel, not necessarily vendors or providers, who can best work with a customer to uncover their true UC requirements. Acting as a trusted advisor that takes a long-term view toward customer relationships and measures success not in widgets sold but in business efficiencies enabled, these partners stand the best chance of establishing clear expectations and guidelines for a UC deployment optimized for a particular business.

Fair enough. But here’s where it gets tricky. In addition to the long consultative sales process typical to UC, and the advanced application integration expertise required to fully enable any but the simplest of implementations, the channel is ultimately responsible for helping their customer Get It (UC, that is) Right.

That means, essentially, not just determining the right combination of UC elements and features for a given customer, but also right-sizing that solution as well. We’re not talking about the number of seats or users covered here; for the channel, success will be measured (at least in the eyes of their customers) by how well the overall solution fits the work habits and needs of employees on an organizational, divisional, and workgroup basis.

In other words, each end-user should be able to activate a full communications experience from their phone and escalate that communication as needed; as one hosted UC provider said, everything on your desktop should integrate with your phone. But depending on the employee’s responsibilities, there’s a wide range of UC functionality out there that they probably just don’t need, and unless some hosted providers move to a lower-cost, all-you-can-eat-per-seat pricing model, that just leaves network and IT resources stranded.

Conversely, some business employees and/or executives are best-served by more advanced UC features, such as hosted integrated business analytics that mine the relevant communication records for analytics and business intelligence. It’s a great feature, but probably overkill for those who just want to see their vmails show up in their Outlook Inbox. Likewise, some vendors supply integrated CRM and other business applications through their CPE, on top of the more basic UC feature set. But unless the company is trying to future-proof itself in preparation for the day when more advanced capabilities are needed, or extending communications feature parity to all workers, remote or centrally located, the customer is probably better served by a more targeted, role-specific implementation. This can lower costs as well as employee frustration.

But that’s just part of the code the channel will have to crack. There’s also genuine confusion about when to go with a hosted UC provider or a CPE approach, and the debate is about more than just cost. Partners will have to steer customers through a wide array of options that take into account control and privacy issues, whether a multi-vendor best-of-breed solution makes more sense than a single vendor or provider implementation (which often lacks the full functionality of a purpose-built offering), or when to embrace a managed service that allows customers to outsource certain functions to reduce complexity and IT costs, while maintaining more mission-critical or highly-sensitive apps and data on-site.

Then there’s the nagging issue of integrating these UC features not just with business apps (where required), but also with key third-party business partners that likely run an entirely different communications platform. Though UC federation, or interoperability, between companies is just starting to get some play now, some well-established vendors are looking at it as an important feature down the line.

Add to that the exploding number of UC options from provider and vendor alike that the channel must absorb to stay fully educated on the best solution for their customers, while trying to maintain healthy sales margins over the course of such a resource-intensive, long-term consultative sale, and it’s clear the channel has its work cut out for it.

To make matters worse, there is some feeling among the providers and vendors I spoke with that they had found a significant number of partners did not really have the market understanding or application integration expertise necessary to really offer their customers the fullest menu of UC solutions, although the same players maintain that this is improving slowly.

But it doesn’t matter. While there will surely be a market for relatively simple, cookie-cutter UC deployments that follow a basic template, the only way forward toward mass adoption lies with those channel partners that can truly offer their customers the full range of features, flexibility and support that the technology offers, something no single provider or vendor can match.

Doug Allen is a freelance journalist and analyst with 12 years of experience covering telecommunications.