I rarely claim to be unbiased here. If I do, you should probably call me a liar. I'm fairly opinionated, and I know it. I try to be open about it too. I'm fairly outspoken about the positive vibes I have for Siemens. I see them as a thought leader in many ways across many different niche areas within unified communications as a brad spectrum. They're a serious player, with long term sustainability. In short, they've got strong mojo.

This is a time of year when all of us who write or blog are looking to what we can say about the year 2007 and what we think is significant ahead in 2008. Thanks to my good relationship working with Siemens, I've also got an opportunity for talking to the unified communications experts at Siemens about what they see as the the most significant UC events to watch for in 2008.

I'm not the expert. If there's value I bring here, it's that I can reach out and talk with some of the real experts. And sometimes I understand what they say in ways that let me translate them into good business sense. Sometimes I just happen to ask good questions. In looking to 2008, I thought I'd try something a little different. Here's a list of areas they've offered to talk about. I'd like to hear from you, dear readers. What among these would you like to hear more about?

Here is a quick glimpse of what they could discuss:

• More Managed Services Providers will announce powerful, new, sophisticated UC offerings for SMEs and large enterprises
• More enterprises of all sizes will adopt UC as a hosted service, following the powerful SaaS trend that's underway
• System integrators will flock to integrate UC into existing business applications (that are either hosted or on-premise)
• Market-leading vendors in the UC space will showcase more customer deployments as the adoption curve spikes upward
• Organizations that deploy UC directly into business apps/workflows will reveal they have achieved new competitive advantages
• Organizations that offshore operations with UC implemented will reveal new levels of efficiencies/faster time to market
• Financial services organizations lead the charge in bringing UC into workflow processes where every second of human latency is extremely expensive
• Presence-based, multimodal UC to the mobile device begins a fast adoption rate in the U.S.
• We'll see the first social networking site bring multimodal communications directly into the communities/content so that members can collaborate with voice, IM, and video like never before. [Think Facebook communities meet video conferencing......all Australian bikers on a video chat in real-time discussing latest stage of Tour de France]. Business leaders quickly figure out they need to harness this power.
• Vendors of enterprise applications and communications vendors will strike new, innovative relationships, accelerating industry consolidation but with a UC twist.