Unified Communication
Next generation unified communication solutions will bring together telephony with collaboration, messaging and conferencing underpinned with presence management and the most popular interaction features from social networking.
However in order to benefit from the scope and fluency of this new communication benchmark, organisations face a number of technical and cultural challenges leading up to their ubiquitous deployment.
Technically the major strategic challenge is to update the roadmap in order to reflect an increasing enterprise communications system compliance with open industry standards, including: Linux O/S; SIP; SOA-compliant Web services (XML, VXML, SOAP) ENUM; and security standards like TLS and SRTP.
Meanwhile tactical procurement decisions will have to recognise that vendors are still evolving their legacy product sets and coming at unified communication from their existing competency base. This will mean some difficult decisions in striking the right balance as a new generation of technology takes over incumbent types of solutions. Roadmap clarity on what are essential features and what may prove to be transitory ways of building solutions will be essential to contain investment costs.
Another migration issue is the fact that few organisations will have either the budget or appetite to rip out and replace. So the medium term future is one of mixed vendor environments integrated as much as possible through the flexibility of open standards. Again a clear technical strategy to direct procurement and roadmap development is essential in order to avoid expensive cul de sacs and reactive integration costs.
Unified Communication Roadmap
Further out on the horizon, technical planners will have to get to grips with federation and its security implications. Simply defined, federation means a single view or image of data from sources originating across multiple and diverse network domains. Although complex to achieve it is generally regarded as the emerging standard for interpersonal communications across network boundaries and will become core to enabling productivity of a dispersed workforce in the future.
At around the same timeline, the demand for communication enabled business process (CEBP) solutions will have matured with common place use of event triggered communications that enable automated notification, to any form of communication device such phones, mobile devices, text based systems and conferencing applications with ‘next step’ interaction options pre configured to enable follow up decision making.
To reach this state of competency, organisations will have needed to become involved in an extensive programme of service enablement to bring their communication, data and system assets into a new level of technical architecture. Again strategic planning and a firm grip on market trends are essential in making progress.
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Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Unified Communication.