Colleague Irwin Lazar has a really interesting post up on the Collaboration Loop.

The Grand Unified Theory of Communications And Collaboration
At last week’s VoiceCon, “unified communications” was the buzzword of the day, with numerous vendors touting their UC wares, and a highly successful “conference within a conference” focused strictly on UC. But UC is about more than technology. The emergence of UC will radically change the way people communicate and collaborate.

But there is still a fair amount of confusion between unified communications and unified messaging, so let's start by defining these two terms.

Irwin expands on the definitions of unified communications and unified messaging:

Unified messaging. Unified messaging deals strictly with the integration of various stored messaging services such as voicemail, e-mail, and fax.  The nirvana of UM is a single user interface to various message stores, enabling such capabilities as listening to an e-mail via a telephone, or playing a voice mail from within an e-mail application. 

Unified communications. Unified communications is broader, focusing on a short-term and long term goal.

First, unified communications is a much bigger buzzword than VoiceCon exposure might lead you to believe. Microsoft and Cisco have been jockeying over the term for quite some time. I wrote about their approaches in VoIP Gorillas in the Mist and again in Gorillas or Titans, either way the battle lines are being drawn. They'll both continue to define it. But Siemens, Nortel, Avaya, and everyone else in the space is doing their part to brand unified communications with their own spin.

As always, Irwin does agreat job of bringing to light both the short and long term goals. The whole point of the post is summarized neatly in one sentence - The emergence of unified communications represents a tearing down of the walls between enterprise applications, communications services, and networks.

That's the path we're on. VoIP is truly a short term goal on that longer path, but we're maknig steps along that path today, and we're maknig progress. Unified communications is beyond voice, beyond IM, beyond web apps. It's the next generation of communications technologies as an integral part of everything we do.

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