Unified Communications is one of the areas I cover pretty closely in my work. Everyone in the business knows that Cisco and Microsoft are the two dominant players at present in UC, especially from the point of view of marketing dollars invested in this market. But over the last few weeks I’ve been struck by the positions of two other players: Dimension Data and BT.

I’ve heard a fair amount from BT about its UC strategy over the last few months as it gears up to make a big push around its solutions in this area. And its focus is going to be on integrating the Cisco and Microsoft solutions. BT is of course a big Cisco partner and through its INS acqusition (now rebranded as BT Professional Services) it is also a big Microsoft partner. As a result, it’s in a great position to bring the two together, and has a project underway to make this happen.

Dimension Data is Cisco’s biggest reseller. It also has a significant business in reselling and managing Microsoft software including Exchange, Sharepoint, and Live Communications Server / Office Communications Server. As such, it too is in a great position to bring the two together, and it also recognizes this and is making it a major thrust of its UC strategy. DiData is in a stronger position with Cisco, whereas (in the US at least) its Microsoft partnership is new and relatively undeveloped compared with BT’s.

Each company has its strengths and weaknesses in this area, but both have recognised a crucial point: that customers will buy many of their UC solutions from Microsoft and Cisco, not one or the other, and most of those will need help integrating the two. For those not directly selling their own UC solutions, this could be a great opportunity, and for these two companies in particular the fit is particularly good. AT&T, Verizon and others will also attempt to play in the UC space, but for these two carriers at least the focus is actually on providing clients that will compete with the Cisco and Microsoft Communicators rather than doing integration work. Although this will win some customers, my money’s on BT and Dimension Data to really make money on UC.

At VoiceCon still today. Two more keynotes early in the day: this time IBM and Cisco. Two more variations on the themes from yesterday. The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys - how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off. With the rest, you’re always left wondering how much of what they present is real and how much is just vision and no more.

The Cisco keynote was classic Cisco - bigger and bolder than anything anyone else did, and an attempt to blow the rest out of the water. A TelePresence roundtable discussion between CMO Sue Bostrom, CEO John Chambers, Al Gore and British journalist Lawrence McGinty. I was only able to stay for half an hour but got the gist. The main thrust was climate change, so in some ways it fit nicely with Lou D’Ambrosio’s assertion that UC can save the US economy, and Pall’s suggestion that UC can transform lives and businesses. John Chambers has certainly signed up as a card-carrying member of the save the planet brigade and it looks like he’s signed Cisco up for the program too.

My conversations today confirmed several of my own thoughts. Democratization of UC is all very well as a long term project, but it’s premature at this stage as a concrete goal. Cisco and Microsoft have work to do in order to get their sales people to embrace the vision their executives articulate around collaboration and interoperability. There’s a sense that enterprises are taking a breather at the moment from pushing forward with UC while they wait to see what happens next on the vendor side. They need convincing that the solutions in the market today are mature enough to deploy, and that there is a real business case for UC, probably for individual departments or other smaller user groups in the first instance.

But the UC train rolls on, and all the major companies are planning future releases to provide more functionality, better integration and a broader set of capabilities. In time, we’ll get to first the aristocratic approach and then to democracy itself, but it’s becoming clearer and clear that all this is a long-term project.

I’m at the VoiceCon conference in Orlando at the moment, for the third year straight. We spent a few days as a family in the Tampa area before I headed over here, and caught some fun Yankees games at Legends Field.

The conference itself has evolved in interesting ways during the time I’ve been coming. Two years ago, Cisco made its big Unified Communications launch, and caught everyone by surprise. As I spent time with the other IP telephony vendors on that occasion, they were all scrambling to say that they had been doing UC for some time already and did everything Cisco was announcing it would do. But I came away predicting that Cisco’s entry into the market would completely change things - and it did. Their sheer size and marketing muscle took UC from a non-issue to the top of the IPT agenda, and has kept it there since.

A year ago, Microsoft made its big announcement around UC, with Jeff Raikes staking out the company’s vision for UC, and a prediction that the price of the PBX would halve as software-based communications took over from the old hardware-centric model. Between Microsoft and Cisco, the UC hype machine has only accelerated since then.

This morning’s keynotes came from Lou D’Ambrosio of Avaya and Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft. The theme that was common to both of them was what D’Ambrosio described as the “democratization of UC” and Pall described as empowering all users, not just the few. He used the analogy of attempting to reduce global warming by making every Rolls Royce a hybrid to argue that providing UC to a handful of employees was unlikely to transform any business. D’Ambrosio took his electoral metaphor further by sharing clips of the remaining presidential candidates ostensibly endorsing Avaya’s vision for UC - a clever and entertaining move. He also asked the audience which candidate they favored - Obama and McCain got roughly equally loud cheers in this most unscientific of straw polls, while Clinton merited barely a smattering of claps.

The democracy vision feels a little premature. It is true that in the IPT world, although many companies have deployed IP to some extent, most have not deployed it to all users, and therefore extending it to the masses is the next logical step. But UC is still at least one step behind. It hasn’t been deployed at all in most companies, and the first step is very much to establish an aristocracy of UC power users rather than to launch straight into a democracy, to stretch D’Ambrosio’s analogy. Most companies are unconvinced of the merits of UC and the return on investment they will achieve, and so want to try a few pilots and trials, just as they did with IPT. That is where the focus should be today, with democracy following much later.

Pall’s presentation at least provided a compelling argument for why eventually empowering all users with UC was a worthy vision. He talked about the transformative power of UC - both in companies and in people’s lives. To illustrate the latter point he shared the example of a hospital which has used Microsoft’s Roundtable videoconferencing solution to allow a young cancer patient to virtually attend school from his hospital room. He gave IT managers a reason (or several) why enabling UC was more than just switching on a few cool features for some power users, and encouragement to see its full potential. Again, I think the fulfilment is several years away, and this vision should not distract from the reality of the first few tough wins today, but there’s no harm in pinning up the democracy goal as a long-term objective.

Looking forward to more interesting speeches and meetings tomorrow.