Enterprise Unified Communications

Unified Communications increasingly valuable to all businesses and enterprises—even those with extensive existing telephony deployments already.  Let’s go over what unified communications means and why it’s important.

In December 2010, Skype, the paragon of consumer-class voice-over-IP (VoIP) service, experienced a massive outage that locked out millions of callers for more than a day. While any service provider might experience some downtime, the issue was that business users really had no recourse because Skype didn’t offer a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing any annual uptime assurance or recourse in the event of downtime. All of those voice, video, and instant messaging services were gone until further notice.

If Skype disappears, “them’s the breaks.” You get what you pay for.

Service level agreements are one of the biggest, and perhaps the most critical, differentiators between consumer and enterprise class unified communications (UC). By UC, we mean real-time messaging (IM and email), digital telephony (VoIP), call routing, video conferencing, presence status (available, busy, away, etc.), and often data sharing (screen sharing, whiteboarding, etc.) in a single, seamless platform. Unified communications are quickly becoming a de facto element in workplace communications and efficiency, but these services must be as dependable as they are robust.

“In business, you can’t afford to have static and hang-ups,” says Mandle Cheung, chairman and CEO of voice solutions provider ComputerTalk. “The Internet is usually the worst of the worst as a communications medium because it’s a public IP network. That’s why companies will build their own private IP networks for things like voice. Then they can split up bandwidth and assign percentages for different traffic types.”

Of course, not every business can afford to build out its own wide-area IP infrastructure. For many, the benefits of UC are worth risking the cost savings of staying on the Internet, even though it may mean risking the occasional dropped call or choppy videochat.

Either way, UC is becoming increasingly valuable to all businesses, even those with extensive existing telephony deployments. Is it worth your while to adopt UC? We’re going to explore this question from many angles in the coming weeks.

For now, let’s discuss what unified communications means and why it’s necessary.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, storage solutions and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.