Ringio "A Bit Surprised" by End User App Demand

No matter how experienced you might be in the broader unified communications, customers still can surprise you, leading to a "why didn't I think of that?" moment. That's what Michael Zirngibl, Ringio co-founder, recently discovered.

Ringio recently found customers asking for, and so built, a calling center function for small businesses operating in several product lines or spaces, but with a single staff. Basically, Ringio sorts inbound calls according to those lines of business, providing screen pops to staff about which business an inbound call is related to.

The other angle is the integration of customer relationship management features with the screen pops, so an organization call agent knows a bit about call history, and what that particular caller might have been asking for help with, on previous calls.

The same sort of feature allows businesses to track leads as well.

"You don't always know what end users want," says Zirngibl.

Enterprise Communications Still Relies on Email and Voice, Study Suggests

A new study of enterprise workers suggests that workers rely on more traditional forms of communication than social media to drive results, as you might expect. Some 83 percent of professionals say email is “critical” or "very important" to their overall success and productivity, and 81 percent said the same for phone calls.

Email and phone ranked the highest above all other forms of communication with audio conferences third at 61 percent.  Sending or receiving an instant message rated as critical for only 38 percent of respondents while social media ranked last at 19 percent.

If a conversation is about closing a deal or making a mission-critical decision, 77 percent of those polled said they would prefer to do it in person. And of those polled, 65 percent said they preferred talking in person when discussing complicated technical concepts and
64 percent would rather do their brainstorming in person.

In fact, 53 percent of all respondents said that they spend 10 or more hours on the phone each week. How can that be if one-to-one phone calls have declined? It appears that more phone time is spent in audio conferences rather than one-to-one conversations.

About 83 percent of respondents said that they dial into an audio conference “frequently" or "all the time” for work. About 56 percent
said that most calls were made from a desk phone, followed by amobile phone (39 percent) and softphone (five percent).

The survey also suggests enterprise workers are making more use of virtually every form of communications with the possible exception of traditional phone calls.

Plantronics surveyed 1,800 enterprise employees in the US, UK, Germany, China, India and Australia. All work in medium or large size companies (100+ employees) and identified themselves as knowledge workers (people whose work centers on developing or working primarily with ideas and information) who use a variety of communications technologies to stay in touch with colleagues, partners and clients. The research was conducted in May and June of 2010.

Google Voice Podcast

Jim Burton, Dave Michels,Samantha Kane, Jon Arnold, Michael Finneran, Art Rosenberg, Don Van Doren, and Steve Leaden talk about the implications Google Voice poses for the broader unified communications space. 
 listen here

Is Social Media the Next Unified Communications Wave?

Is it possible social media and social networking are the next wave of unified communications development? Some might argue it is, based on the fact that 73 percent of respondents to a recent Yankee Group survey say they use social media tools at work.

Click on image for a larger view.

While tools such as video conferencing, corporate chat and workplace forums are primarily used in the workplace, text messaging, blogs, consumer social networking and chat are important for both work and personal reasons.

Considering roughly 40 percent of respondents participate in blogs or use social networking for both work and personal use, companies might start looking at social media as a part of the UC mix.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

Unified Communications Seems Less Important than Conferencing, Survey Suggests

For almost a decade now, the industry has touted unified communications (UC) and VoIP as technologies that can help individuals collaborate, improve worker productivity and dramatically lower the total cost of corporate communications.

However, despite the promise and hype, the majority of UC applications deployed today revolve around basic conferencing services and unified messaging.

UC applications such as presence and mobile integration remain low in both adoption and plans to adopt. Click on the image for a larger view.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

Technology Helps Workers Do "More with Less:" It Has To

Nearly one in two Americans (48 percent) who use technology in their everyday jobs say that they are now required to do more work with fewer resources due to the current economic climate. As an example, nearly one third (30 percent) feel that they need to stay connected to work 24/7, even during weekends, breaks or holidays, according to a new survey by Intercall.

That is likely one reason why the United States has the highest percentage of mobile workers in its workforce, according to February 2010 data from IDC, with 75.5 percent of the workforce, or 119.7 million people, expected to be mobile by 2013.

And 79 percent of them plan on taking their work-related devices with them on vacation, according to  Osterman Research.

Fully 72 percent say that advanced technology, such as conferencing and collaboration tools, enables them to work faster, better and improves their morale – because they see the company providing them with the right resources and tools to "do more with less," according to Intercall.

One in two American workers (48 percent) report being constantly required to do more with less, while 39 percent report that they’ve been doing the job of two people because of the impact of the economic recession, Intercall reports. The issue, of course, is if, when and how that will change in the future.

One in two workers say that taking time off of work is increasingly challenging, while one in three
workers say that they feel like they need to stay connected to their work 24/7.

The Intercall survey was conducted online among a national sample of 2500 Americans 18+.

Interall survey results here

see related article here

98% of Fortune 1000 Firms Have UC Tests, Deployments or Plans

Only two percent of Fortune 1000 companies are not already in active pilot or deployment or are considering a unified communications implementation, a survey sponsored by Plantronics finds.

The only thing surprising in that finding is that there are any Fortune 1000 firms that are not using, planning or testing a UC implementation of some kind.

Given the wide range of UC applications, it would seem unlikely that any firms large enough to qualify for the Fortune 1000 list would not already be using some unified communications apps, whether they know it or not.

The survey suggests 34 percent of workers at such firms are road warriors while 29 percent are telecommuters (working mostly from home). As workforces become more distributed, technology that connects people and enables real-time collaboration becomes essential.

About 94 percent of those surveyed plan to roll out voice-related UC apps within the next 24 months while 66 percent of respondents plan to deploy desktop video within the next two years.

Some 45 percent of respondents said end-user training is key to help users understand basic audio and voice end-point functionality and to enable them to customize options and solve basic issues on their own.

Similarly, 48 percent of respondents said it’s critical to train IT on audio end-points, so they can educate users about end-points and resolve potential issues before they arise.

Employees who are accustomed to using traditional desk phones have very high expectations for audio quality. In fact, more than 50 percent of decision makers said end-points and audio quality are “extremely important” to the overall UC experience. If audio quality is poor when talking to customers, partners and other important audiences, users won’t adopt UC and deployments fail.

Social Networking Eclipsing Email?

Many observers have noted that one of the big changes in technology adoption over the past half decade is the preponderance of "consumer" technology compared to "enterprise" technology tools. Not only are consumer tools reshaping enterprise applications but most of the innovation now occurs on the consumer side as well.

Internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says that social network use is bigger than email in terms of both aggregate numbers of users and time spent, and is still growing rapidly.

Meeker attributes social networking’s success to the fact that it’s a “unified communications plus multimedia creation tool in your pocket.” The intriguing notion there is that tools not originally envisioned as part of the unified comnmunications feature set are now in some cases supplanting those features.

In fact, consumer tools in this case seem to be displacing at some of the utility enterprise unified communications services and applications were envisioned as supplying.

Social networking passed email in terms of time spent in 2007, hitting about 100 billion minutes a month globally and now is twice that.

Social networking passed email in terms of raw user numbers in July of 2009, with more than 800 million users. Given the rate at which Facebook has been growing, that number is probably now closer to a billion users, she says.

In many ways, social networking is to unified communications as consumer VoIP was to enterprise IP telephony: all the attention was the latter, not the former, but most of the growth has occurred in the former, not the latter.

Social Networking Changing Collaboration at Work

Social networking is starting to change the nature of worker collaboration within companies, new poll conducted by Harris Research suggests. Of workers who use social networking at work, 59 percent say that their usage of social networking has increased over the past year. But only about 17 percent of the 1,000 workers surveyed report using social networking.

The study found the most frequently used application for collaborating with others is email (91 percent), but that what people want from their email is changing. In addition to email, the Harris poll found that other applications being used by respondents to collaborate with others in the workplace include shared spaces (66 percent), voice calls and teleconferencing (66 percent), web conferencing (55 percent), video conferencing (35 percent), instant messaging (34 percent), and social networking (17 percent).

Respondents like the fact that email provides an easily-accessible record of communication and the ability to communicate with many people at once. Users also rank email prominently among various collaboration tools because there is a high level of comfort in using the application to easily communicate with others inside and outside their organizations. However, the poll showed there are many pain points associated with the way most email solutions function today.

While email remains the preferred method of collaboration, many respondents complained they receive too much irrelevant email (40 percent) and that they lack the ability to collaborate in real time (32 percent). End users also dislike the fact that they have very limited storage (25 percent) and that large volumes of email come into their inbox with no organizational structure (21 percent).

Half of those using social networking for work by-pass company restrictions to do so. The study participants who prefer to use social networks indicated they would like to have control over who sees their content as well as be able to share with groups of users using different tools. The respondents also indicated the desire to collaborate in real time without having to open up an additional application.

Collaboration is More than "Communications"

Collaboration is much more than communications, as Dave Michels points out. That is an area of fuzziness when we now speak of "unified communications and collaboration."

Communications is supposed to aid and foster collaboration. "Unified" approaches are supposed to help.  Sometimes they do. But not always.

Some of us are unfortunately old enough to remember when new investments in local area networks and related technology were supposed to improve productivity. Then we went for a decade without seeing measurable productivity gains people could agree on.

Then we had a decade when those investments finally seemed to pay off. The point here is that productivity gains sometimes require retraining people, so processes can be redesigned. And that can take a while. More than just a couple of years, as it turns out.

That does not mean IP communications will fail to deliver meaningful productivity gains. It does mean we often overestimate what is possible in the near term. But we also tend to underestimate what is possible longer term.

Somebody recently reminded me that some of us can remember a world before "Carterfone." Others just "heard about it." Of course, the Carterfone decision happened about 42 years ago. The issue then was simply the legal right to attach a modem to the public switched telephone network.

Where we are today began with Carterfone, but has far outstripped what anybody might have believed was possible. One suspects the world will be affected far beyond what anybody now can imagine in another 40 years.

We are likely then to face incredulous looks when people are told how work and play was mediated by networks in 2010. "That's all you could do?" is likely to be their response. Of course, in 2050 we will be about as far from Carterfone as Carterfone was from the invention of the telephone.

We will get further than any of us can now imagine. But we can go a decade or so before any important innovation has time to really change the way people live and work.

And some innovations just never have too much long-lasting impact. ISDN, ATM, and OSI come to mind. Don't worry, in some ways they are just like Carterfone: steps on a long journey.

Is UC Still Relevant and Growing?

IP-based communications often has not developed as its supporters have forecast. Suppliers thought it was an "enterprise" product, but VoIP erupted in the consumer space. That actually has been the rule, of late, not the exception.

Email, the Internet, instant messaging, text messaging, search, social networking, broadband and mobility all gained traction in the consumer space and then were forced upon enterprises.

Has unified communications now been superseded by social media and mobile devices? For many enterprise executives, that is a rhetorical question, though it might not be so rhetorical for smaller organizations or individuals.

Contact centers remain the province of enterprise-class unified communications solutions and nearly all office environments, as well as for traveling workers who need access to home office communications features.

Global businesses likewise benefit from enterprise-grade unified communications more than small, local businesses and organizations.

Since supplier organizations tend to mirror the organizations they sell to, that means many large suppliers of unified communications believe in its value because they themselves are large, far-flung organizations in best position to leverage UC and other collaboration tools.

What is not so self evidently clear is that the same level of benefit is obtained by smaller, more localized user organizations and firms.

"These customers aren’t worried about presence and a unified portal," says David Burnand, a former Siemens enterprise communications executive. In fact, "many of them run their business using mobile handsets, simple PBXs, social media, Skype and Google Voice."

Many use elements of unified communications, including single number services, video-calling and instant messaging. They just don’t call it unified communications, or use those tools because they are "unified." They use point solutions because they solve real problems.

The point, says Burnand, is that "old school" definitions of unified communications do not hold.

UC is no longer about managing a desk phone, mobile, Windows PC and many other devices. The smart phone has made that view redundant for all except the power users, he argues.

Instead, it is evolving into skinny applications for low-end users and specialist applications for power users, mixed with a dose of social media, a splash of video and a few Web-based collaboration tools.

That will be an unsettling view for many unified communications or collaboration suppliers, as it suggests the "UC market" is far smaller than many would have predicted for hoped for.

Unified Communications is Not a New Market, says Frost and Sullivan

"Unified communications is not a new market," argues Melanie Turek, Frost and Sullivan analyst. Mostly, it is a repackaging of many existing businesses, ranging from business phone systems to collaboration software suites.

That doesn't mean there are not some new products, industry segments and providers. But most of the revenue is driven by legacy products, she suggests.

"It's a way for vendors in existing markets to continue making money," says Turek. "The biggest impetus for the players in this space to keep playing isn't to deliver new business revenue; it's to stop existing, or past, revenues from disappearing—not to another vendor (although that's always a risk), but from the market altogether."

In many cases, the goal is simply to give customers a reason to upgrade. "Unless those vendors can deliver a compelling reason for companies to move to the next version of their communications and collaboration software, companies aren't going to," says Turek.

And the telephony vendors have it even worse: Hard phones and network gear should be built to last: sometimes decades or more, says Turek. " And except in certain specific use cases, like the contact center, businesses don’t need or want to add more features to their employees' handsets."

That doesn't mean there isn't a market for UC, she says. There are new applications. But those new products might simply serve to keep those vendors in business.

The question for vendors, then, is how to grab a bigger piece of the already-existing pie, says Turek.  And that is what makes quantifying the size of the UC market so difficult.

79% Business IP Voice by 2013, In-Stat Forecasts

VoIP penetration among U.S. businesses will increase rapidly over the next few years, reaching 79 percent by 2013, compared to 42 percent at the end of 2009, In-Stat says. This penetration reflects companies having a VoIP solution deployed in at least one location.

 In-Stat now finds that 41 percenrt of businesses with VoIP capability have no legacy TDM voice services, compared to 34 percent in 2008. About 42 percent of US businesses now have a VoIP solution in at least one location, In-Stat says.

Hosted IP services such as IP Centrex also saw steady growth in 2009, while IP PBX growth was significantly stunted.

While there are indications that the economy and high-tech investments are in slow recovery, IP equipment investments are likely to lag other areas, In-Stat says.

VoIP adopters now have a good understanding of the cost savings associated with VoIP, and have oriented their limited budgets to optimizing efficiency and savings by replacing legacy TDM voice solutions, says David Lemelin, In-Stat analyst.

With businesses opening up fewer new locations than we have seen in recent years, much of this current investment is occurring at headquarters locations where efficiencies and savings can be maximized.

Hosted IP Centrex has now surpassed broadband IP telephony as the leading revenue-generating, carrier-based business VoIP solution. In other words, business IP telephony now generates more revenue than other forms of business VoIP, In-Stat says.

Still, 33 percent of businesses that have already deployed VoIP solutions report that recent economic conditions have caused them to slow additional deployment plans, compared to 30 percent reporting no change in plans.

Broadband IP Telephony revenues continue to grow and will more than double by 2013, compared to 2008, driven by single-user applications among increasingly distributed and mobile workforces.

"File Sharing" While in Conference Seen as Most Important "Collaboration" Feature

In-Stat says SIP trunking, wireless and cloud-based computing are key changes in the unified communications business.  But notice that respondents to a recent In-Stat survey say "collaboration" means "file sharing," not necessarily visual communications, telepresence or videoconferencing, as some might mean in the phrase "unified communications and collaboration."

File sharing while in conference is seen as the application of most importance, not necessarily "seeing" other participants.

Voxbone Adds Text Messages to Global Phone Numbers

Proponents have argued that  new IP-based communications would offer many innovative features not possible on older telephone networks. Voxbone, for example, now provides "global phone numbers" that are not tied to a specific country, and now has added text message support for those numbers, a feature that will be welcomed by users who see the advantages of a single, global telephone number.

Voxbone’s carrier and enterprise customers now can offer their subscribers one global number that can receive SMS messages at competitive rates, on mobile phones that do not have Internet access. In other words, it works the way the current services do, in terms of user interface and experience.

The move marks something of a potential breakthrough in "iNum" usage, as wireless subscribers from a growing number of prominent carriers, including Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Virgin, and Boost Mobile, now are able to send text messages to iNum "phone" numbers.

The service is already available in the United Kingdom, France and the United States, at prices ranging from 10 to 20 pence per message in the United Kingdom., for example.

Voxbone will be adding reachability from more wireless carriers in more countries in the coming weeks.

The new feature highlights another interesting angle: Landline phones have not traditionally been able to receive text messages. It isn't entirely clear how many people would find this interesting or useful. But it could be done.

All iNum numbers have a prefix of +883, the International Telecommunications Union-assigned international code for the Internet, just as +44 is the code for the U.K. and +1 refers to the U.S.
As a wholesaler of direct-inward-dial numbers and IP transport provider, Voxbone receives calls, and now SMS messages, to numbers with this code and delivers them over IP to its carrier customers, for delivery to their end users.

Consumers Now Drive Unified Communications

A funny thing has happened to VoIP, unified communications and videoconferencing. Originally seen by many developers as products most important to business and enterprise users, each has gotten most traction in the consumer space.

 Analysts at Gartner, for example, now say that consumer markets, and not the unified communications and collaboraion vendors, are driving innovation in the UCC space.

Some 79 percent of respondents to a recent survey by Global IP Solutions said that they currently use a consumer application such as Skype as their primary videoconferencing application, for example.

Skype points out that more than 30 percent of its global user base uses the service for business, while “an average of 34 percent of Skype-to-Skype calls now including video,” says Josh Silverman, Skype CEO.

Skype also is used for international traffic and many businesses are becoming more open to using hosted solutions for business applications.

An argument might also be made that much of the value of UC or UCC actually is captured by use of relatively simple tools such as Skype, or Google Voice or any number of other rather easy to understand consumer applications.

IT Professionals Don't Think Much of Enterprise Communications, Study Suggests

In a recent survey of 544 information technology professionals, Freeform Dynamics discovered that relatively few U.K. and U.S. IT professionals are satisfied that their communications capabilities are highly efficient and effective.

Except for firms with fewer than 10 employees, less than 20 percent of respondents indicated their communications capabilities were, in fact, very well suited to current business requirements.

You may take that as a good sign that much upside continues to exist for unified and advanced communications that IT professionals believe really help their organizations perform more effectively.

But you might also take it as a sign that the industry, collectively, has done a poor job of creating and delivering on solutions that IT professionals believe are well suited to business requirements. Either way, the Freeform Dynamics study suggests there is much opportunity to provide solutions that actually are perceived to deliver value.

One is tempted to say we haven't done a very good job with unified communications, but it might be worse than that. We might not have done such a great job with communications, period.

Conferencing Now Part of UC, Study Finds

UC is often thought of as a broad solution set including a unified directory, unified messaging, a single number (find me, follow me), presence awareness and the ability to track all forms of communication, say Josie Sephton and Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics researchers.

What seems to have changed lately is the increased role conferencing solutions seem to be playing as parts of an integrated UC solution. Among lead adopters, audio conferencing is viewed as a mandatory feature by more than 70 percent of information technology executives surveyed by Freeform Dynamics.

More than 40 percent of all respondents said that audio conferencing is mandatory (Click on image to see larger view).

Nearly 20 percent of the most-aggressive UC adopters say video calling is mandatory, while more than 65 percent say that features is "desirable." So far, fewer than 10 percent of all respondents say video calling is mandatory.

About 25 percent of early UC adopters say video conferencing is a mandatory UC feature, and about 55 percent of early adopters say Web conferencing is a mandatory UC feature.

Instant messaging is seen by more than 80 percent of early adopters as a mandatory feature. Nearly 40 percent of all enterprise IT executives say IM is necessary.

ADTRAN Unveils "NetVanta Unified Communications Solution Suite"

The issue with many unified communications solutions is that they explicitly or implicitly require people to change the ways they do things. ADTRAN thinks that doesn't work. The other problem is that people sometimes have trouble envisioning how IP communications can help them, in concrete ways.

For that reason, the new "NetVanta Unified Communications Solution Suite" provides voice mail, unified messaging, fax server, and auto attendant features that are compatible with legacy and IP-based business phone systems, with a big focus on the ability to create business process apps.

NetVanta UC solutions are designed to accommodate from five to greater than 2,000 users per server,  and are designed to allow rapid creation of vertical market applications for the  banking, hospitality, education, health care, retail and real estate industries, for example.

The "NetVanta UC Solutions Suite" includes the "NetVanta UC Server," a software-based UC application designed for customers with an existing PBX.  Microsoft Windows platforms and scales up to 2,000 or more users per server. It is capable of supporting unified communications on one or more different types of PBXs from a variety of leading manufacturers.

It provides unified messaging, fax server, auto-attendants, personal assistants, graphical drag-and drop service creation, IVR for inbound and outbound calling services, integration with ODBC databases, text to speech, one number services and call redirection services and notifications.

The "NetVanta Business Communications System" combines the NetVanta 7000 Series IP-PBXs with the NetVanta UC Server, enhanced with click-to-dial capabilities and an integrated conference server.

The "NetVanta Enterprise Communications Server" is a complete IP-based voice system for larger enterprises. Designed for use with Microsoft Windows and "Active Directory," it offers a full soft IP-PBX that is complemented with all the UC features of NetVanta UC Server, plus click-to-dial, an integrated conference server, a paging server for overhead paging.

The "NetVanta Business Application Server," scalable to more than 200 concurrent calls, allows businesses to create cost-effective new apps using a graphical drag-and-drop service
creation environment.

It allows channel partners, service providers and IT and telecom professionals to quickly and easily create tailored communications services. The app server integrates with existing application databases.

It is useful as a standalone solution or can integrate with Microsoft OCS or IBM Lotus Sametime, for example. It also works with IMAP email servers and Google Gmail.

The new NetVanta products are all software applications using the Microsoft platform. The key decision for a buyer is whether it wants to "buy a new PBX" or "keep" what it already has.

If a firm has 10 to 100 users, it will tend to buy a new PBX. If it has 75 to 2,000 users per location, it also will tend to want the enterprise communications server.

The complete line includes a standards-based PBX, switch, router, firewall, voicemail, voice gateways, auto attendant, integrated messaging. The base package now supports as many as100 users. Larger organizations will use the enteprise communications server, using ADTRAN or Polycom handsets.

One advantage of the system is that it works with analog or IP business phone systems. More significantly, though, it allows rapid creation of vertical market apps.

In the real estate business, the "Talking House" application can be used to create automated logs of who is calling in to inquire about a property, or allow prospects to get information on any property an agent is showing, with the materials created directly by the agent.

Agents can have people contact them right away, listen to an IVR message or create marketing materials that can be faxed or emailed to people who want more information.

The same thing can be used by auto dealers to automate the process of car warranty notifications and doctor's offices can automate the reminder process.

"In a business office environment, customers can use unified messaging to provide more value, using our PBX or anybody else's," says Jeff Wissing, ADTRAN senior product manager.

"You can deliver a fax to a smartphhone, forward messages, read emails over the phone or harvest telephone numbers from existing directories and then place calls," says Wissing.

"If you listen to customers, you can create apps for them," Wissig says. In some cases it might take only minutes, it other cases a few hours to create an app. Once a reseller learns the environment, the reseller can use the tools to create all sorts of templates for their end users.

The whole idea is to "make it very personal and customized," he says.

"Customized services are a big draw and makes end users very sticky," Wissig notes. "It very often is faster to spend an hour to build a prototype service, and then have the customer use it, than to explain what a user might do."

"We had a B2B call center and built a prototype in 15 minutes to show how the solution would work," Wissig says. The customer got a payback on the system within 30 days, he says.

"In every organization there are ROI opportunities with UC that are lurking, just waiting to be discovered," says Wissing. "You just have to know how to find them."

A manufacturer of personalized items such as rubber stamps, signs and business cards might create an IVR application that provides 7/24 order status to customers with small orders, allowing their call attendants to concentrate on providing personal service to larger customers.

A wallpaper manufacturer might use an IVR application to provide product availability and pricing to their resellers based on their membership level in their reseller program, providing reliable 7/24 service without the need for call takers.

A large multi-national company might use an application that reliably redirects after-hours calls for support to the cell phones or even home numbers of on-duty support staff, eliminating the need for physical staffing of an after-hours call center.

A video store might allow callers to place orders 7/24 without the need for an after-hours service team.

Is the Unified Communications Business Growing or Shrinking?

One of the "problems" observers have when evaluating the size of the unified communications market is that UC includes so many different legacy products and services, ranging from business phone services to software applications and hosted services.

The other issue is that UC applications overlap with and complement other applications such as mobility and social networking, which can make an accurate estimate of product sales difficult. Analysts at Forrester Research, for example, suggest that sales of legacy products of all sorts are not growing much at all, while sales of business phone systems might drop precipitously in coming years. This forecast represents annual sales volume in billions of dollars, for example.

Whether UC is important or not is not the issue. Lots of other useful, even essential services and applications, such as email and voice, represent indirect revenue streams, or even declining revenue, despite their inherent usefulness.

Something of that sort seems to be underway in many segments of the UC business. This forecast does not cover other product segments that likely will represent parts of the future UC revenue stream, such as telepresence, a direct UC application, or even access services such as SIP trunking that will be used to support unified communications.