• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Telecom and Software Companies Must Work Together to Achieve Unified Collaboration

Posted on: Tuesday, 13 March 2007, 12:00 CDT

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c51915) has announced the addition of The Battle for Unified Collaboration: Telecoms vs. Software Companies to their offering.

Equipment vendors in the telecoms sector are increasingly talking about 'unified communications'. For the telecoms vendors the term unified communications implies an applications set that extends beyond voice into the collaboration space traditionally occupied by the major desktop software vendors such as IBM and Microsoft. The term also recognises that communications can be from a wide range of devices over both fixed and mobile networks and that, for many end users, the 'desktop' will increasingly become a portable mobile device. At the same time, Microsoft is committed to extending its own collaboration capabilities into key components of the enterprise voice space traditionally occupied by the telecoms vendors.

The increasing convergence of these two areas is starting to define a new space -- unified collaboration. From a technology perspective this convergence has been driven by the adoption of IP, and is now being greatly accelerated by the almost universal support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) by both the telecoms and collaboration software players.

This report investigates the communication and collaboration offerings from both the telecoms and software communities. The obvious area of contention is the grey area between the functions that are clearly part of the typical software collaboration suite, and those that are becoming extensions of the telecoms vendors' unified communications offerings. As an increasing number of vendors in the telecoms sector are already delivering enterprise software for collaboration, the battleground runs right up to the end user.

Given the dominance of the telecoms community in realtime communication areas such as voice and video it is unlikely that they will yield their position easily. Similarly, the software sector owns the desktop and will not give that up either. The only practical solution is for the two to work together to offer the best of both worlds in comprehensive unified collaboration solutions.

Key messages

From communication to collaboration

The information exchange continuum

The main participants

The collaboration tools

Ovum model for collaboration software

Software vendor activities

Activities in the telecoms sector

Consumer tools

The battleground

Sector functionality overlaps

Telecoms sector vs software sector

The collaboration space will be strongly fought over

Microsoft's ambitions in enterprise voice

The importance of presence

From unified communications to unified collaboration

Table of figures

Figure 1 From communication to collaboration

Figure 2 The starting point

Figure 3 Overlap of features and functions in software and telecoms

Figure 4 The collaboration software stack

Figure 5 Average software vendors' offerings

Figure 6 Average telecoms sector offerings

Figure 7 Functionality overlap

Figure 8 The battleground for collaboration

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c51915

Source: Ovum

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category