I've been giving a lot of thought the past few months to the changing face of unified communications. I've talked about many facets of the broader field here lately, but it's a small piece of technical evolution I find fascinating, especially when I think of my own journey in the sector.

If I set aside my other interests, like designing networks for performance and network security, and just focus on the communications aspects, here's what I see in the unified communications segment and how it mirrors, in some ways, my own personal evolution.

About 5-6 years ago, I wrote IP Telephony Demystified. At the time, VoIP was a relatively young, arguably disruptive technology. VoIP foretold the promise of complete disruption of the telecommunications industry, with the potential to wrestle a large portion of the user market away from the traditional telecommunications carriers.

That still hasn't happened, and many people wonder why.

There's a fundamental issue with networking technologies. It's a lesson that solution providers have learned time and again, yet continually fail to anticipate, but is quite obvious really.

Users want the service. The end service, and nothing more. VoIP is of interest to service providers, carriers, new entrants into the telecom sector, and as a convergence and integration tool for enterprises. But not to the people holding a telephone.

Voice service is what users want. They care about availability, the coverage footprint, call quality and cost. They could care less whether voice is carried by TDM telephony, ATM, IP, wireless or carrier pigeon. They care about the quality of the call because voice is a person-to-person conversation.

Unified communications has evolved and is really today's descriptive buzz phrase for what we've called convergence or integration of voice and data. It's bigger, better, broader and deeper than we anticipated five years ago, but at it's core, that's what it is.

We're seeing the integration of voice and data services in new ways. Some are evolving quickly and some pretty slowly.

The idea of a Software Oriented Architecture, integrating voice services into data applications isn't new. Click-to-call functionality can arguably viewed as part of SOA, and it's been around for years. Yet today many people see it as something hot and new. But as a piece of the convergence to a unified communications network, it's something I expect to be talking about more.

Social networking tools aren't new. I sometimes argue that tech centers from the past, specially the Well and Compuserve represent the early examples of online social networking tools. Computer bulletin boards prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet served many of the same social networking functions. For many of us the social network and the business network overlap in large degree, so social networking tools are de facto business networking tools.

Today, there's a newer aspect of social networking that we talk abotu in terms of presence and availability. And those have now larger been expanded to include some form of status as well. Social networking tools are, to me, becoming an integral part of unified communications, because in many ways, they are the leading edge real-world demonstrators of what unified communications can do.

Whether it's Microsoft's Live Communications Service, Yahoo's Instant Messenger, Jaiku, Facebook, or LinkedIn, these social networking tools are leading the move into fully integrating communications with data services. They provide a strong indicator of what the technologies might do, and they introduce new ways we can think about using communications to more effectively manage our businesses and maintain personal and business relationships. So I'll be talking more about social networks and how they integrate with unified communications in the coming months as well.

We live in interesting times.


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