Take A Close Look At UC Applications

A major concern for organizations planning unified communications (UC) projects is how to justify their cost during times of budget constraints. By fully understanding the capabilities of UC applications, IT managers can better determine how these applications deliver value to their organization. Presence, integrated messaging, and collaboration are fundamental UC applications that facilitate business processes and enable companies to collaborate more effectively. Integrating these applications on a UC platform provides new benefits such as reducing time to reach critical project milestones and enabling real-time collaboration among knowledge workers. This report examines how leading UC vendors support this group of UC applications, either directly or through partnerships. This is part two in a series on UC applications. Part one of this series considered UC applications for conferencing, mobility, and desktop call control, and part three provides insight in vendors' pricing methodology. In addition to product features, IT managers should look at the total integrated solution when building an effective strategy for UC upgrades.