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Corporate adoption of unified communications is finally progressing beyond voice-over-IP. And the demand is coming from an unlikely source: the users themselves

The first step to unifying communications around the Internet protocol (IP) is now taken for granted, businesses of all sizes have warmed to the cost savings inherent in the move to voice-over-IP (VoIP). But enthusiasm for other applications that can be run over a unified IP network is proving more measured.

One reason for this is that there is a great deal of confusion over what unified communications (UC) actually offers. IP phones and switches might be the initial manifestation, but to stop there is to limit the full value a company can get from its network. For the UC banner covers the integration of a wide but amorphous range of technologies including mobile devices, digital CCTV, teleconferencing gear, voicemail via email, identity systems that unify home, work and mobile phone numbers and instant messaging (IM) applications that allow staff to determine their presence: (‘do not disturb, ‘open to calls’, ‘out of office’, and so on).

Information Age’s Effective IT survey found that over 60% of respondents’ companies have already unified some aspects of network architecture around IP, while a further 17% plan to adopt unified communications over the coming year. While a few respondents were neutral about its effectiveness, 42% described it as “effective” while a further quarter considered it “very effective”.

Many unified IP implementations are initially driven by the cost savings of converting voice to data, a boon for any company spread across the globe, for example. Historically the somewhat hype-ridden sector’s inability to nail down the business benefits of offerings other than VoIP – beyond ‘nice to have’ – has stunted adoption rates. However, more recently, the dramatic rise of consumer communication technologies, particularly IM and advanced handheld devices, has put UC back on the enterprise agenda.

Some technology providers are trying to drive that agenda faster than others. Microsoft’s feverish promotion of Office Communication Server (OCS) has helped raise UC’s profile, but the tech giant is by no means the first to market. Cisco has long backed UC as a means of selling prodigious amounts of networking gear, while more specialised companies such as Avaya, Siemens and Nortel have also been competing in this field against large, well-established systems and services firms like IBM and BT.

Their combined marketing efforts might make UC look slick on paper, but beyond IP telephony businesses have shown reluctance to believe the hype. Workplace IM and a presence engine might boost productivity, while an identity system might negate the need to fumble with home, work and mobile numbers, but does that ultimately justify the investment?

A Forrester Research report earlier this year claimed that 55% of IT decision-makers were struggling to identify the value of UC for their companies, and that despite a 20% boost in the number of (greatly publicised) UC pilots in recent years these trials were not translating into deployments. The analyst firm claimed that despite broad understanding of the concept, many companies displayed “schizophrenic attitudes toward understanding the business case.”

The problem, says Anthony Finbow, CEO of voice-quality assessment firm Psytechnics,is that the UC vendors “are not effectively communicating its value to business.

Unless [businesses] see value, they are not going to take it on.” A typical customer, he explains, is “a medium-to-large enterprise involved in UC at an IP telephony level, but now looking at introducing videoconferencing to cut travel budgets and pay lip service to a green agenda.”

Indeed few successful UC projects fit solely under the one label. A digital CCTV and door monitoring system reachable from a PDA carried by a security guard, as deployed by Falmouth College in Cornwall, is fundamentally a security initiative as much as it is UC.

The college was able to achieve this, says head of IT Nathan Prisk, because it was among the first higher education institutions to install VoIP – over six years ago – and had the foresight to see the UC opportunities prior to a recent £70 million campus upgrade. In Falmouth’s case, IP telephony was one area that proved its value and led to the adoption of other facets of UC.

In fact, having proved itself far less expensive than legacy PBX systems, the adoption of digital telephony accelerated dramatically in 2008 culminating in a 25% increase in IP phone shipments in the third quarter, according to research firm Infonetics. Despite this Ettienne Reinecke, CTO of networking services giant Dimension Data, says that the further step to a full UC environment remains a hard sell even if the need for one is abundant.

“In a typical example, when we go to a company to explain the power of UC we often have to introduce different groups in the same company to each other,” he says. However, “nobody goes out to buy UC in the same way they might buy Outlook; the technology is complex, and people [across business and IT] feel threatened by different priorities.”

User-driven

Fortunately for vendors there is a powerful inside influence: the users themselves. Many businesses are running a real risk of being marginalised in the UC arena by users introducing rogue consumer-grade UC applications into the workplace environment. Nowhere is the consumerisation of IT more evident than in the communications sphere, with applications such as Skype, IM and GoToMyPC appearing in companies where similar enterprise-class tools are not provided. Much of the time, says Nick Sears, vice president of IM security firm FaceTime, IT has no idea.

“It’s a much wider issue than people realise,” he says. “A lot of companies think the infiltration under control. They have a firewall, a proxy… people expect these solutions to provide protection. But it’s absolutely true that right now your users are using IM or peer-to-peer networks to send information out of the company – information that would be stopped by email. In our user surveys, 50% of users admit they use real-time communications apps [such as Skype] to send info out of the company that wouldn’t go through email channels.”

Reinecke concurs, saying workplace UC adoption is already “way beyond what we currently believe it is”, driven by the increasing popularity and acceptance of consumer applications and user frustration at not being able to use them in the workplace.

“Consumers are taking [the applications] they have at home and are unleashing them into the organisation,” he says. “You can use controls to block them, but it’s not the right thing to do – people will find ways around it.”

“It is not beyond the realm of speculation to suggest that enterprise user communication adoption could well become a security imperative”

Sears reels off figures that would frighten any chief security officer who might presume absolute confidence in the integrity of their application environment.

“We ran our appliance for three weeks at a company with several thousand users and a senior security director who was confident no such applications were running on his network,” he says. “We found 25,000 IM conversations with external sources, and 20GB of peer-to-peer traffic that included BitTorrent, Skype and apps like Tor and Hopster that are used to bypass proxies. We also found someone who’s PC had been remote-controlled 11 times by GoToMyPC without their knowledge. The company had a web proxy platform, firewall, and security platform from leading vendors, and the traffic got through all that infrastructure.”

It is not beyond the realm of speculation to suggest that enterprise UC adoption could well become a security imperative, if only to discourage users from introducing it themselves – currently only the most sophisticated DLP (data loss prevention) tools are able to monitor the IM wilderness.

While one option is a ceaseless war on rogue applications, some companies approach the problem as just a sign that the demand for UC is there. Half the IT managers interviewed in October for a Dimension Data study said there was significant demand for UC initiatives coming from employees, especially younger staff. Savvy companies embraced this: 61% of those with UC implementations said adoption was faster than other IT projects because users were already familiar with the concepts.

Says Rob Stanley, Dimension Data’s line of business director, “Employees, especially young graduates, are frustrated by inflexible, old-fashioned technology and draconian usage policies.”