What You'll Hear at my VoiceCon SessionWhat You'll Hear at my VoiceCon Session

What are the questions enterprise customers should be asking themselves, what are the suggested ways to get started, and some things they should be doing to ensure success.

On Tuesday afternoon at VoiceCon San Francisco, I'll be giving my "Unified Communications Market Update & Forecast" presentation. This is my third year giving this presentation at VoiceCon, and there's always something new to talk about. As in previous years I'll start with some level setting to make sure we're all talking about the same thing, as well as some results from an end-user survey I conducted with Nancy Jamison, a brief overview of the UC vendors and players, a look at UC in today's economy, return on investment and the different ways to look at ROI (hard, soft and borderline), and wrapping up with information on how to get started in your UC deployment. And of course I'll be presenting my latest UC market numbers and forecast.As I wrote in a previous No Jitter blog, I've had to recently revise my UC revenue and shipment market data due to the lackluster economy, which took a toll on enterprise spending, including UC. In 2008 and early 2009, the UC market was starting to pick up some momentum, with companies trying out Microsoft OCS and IBM's Lotus Sametime, as well as UC clients and products from the various switch vendors. But the spending significantly slowed down in the past 9 months, and I don't expect to see things pick up until at least the second quarter of 2010. The areas showing the most growth are UC PBX integration, conferencing/collaboration, and IM/Presence. But it's important to note that these are the components that have the smallest installed base and are relatively newer than the other components, such as unified messaging and IP PBXs, which have been around for years and have significant installed bases. Those of you who've seen the way I approach measuring the UC market know that it is different than the way most of my fellow analysts measure the market, as I try to be a bit more granular and specific in terms of "gross or total" UC revenue and "net or true" UC revenues.

In light of the economy, I'll discuss the three types of "modes" that enterprise companies are in regarding making investments in UC solutions--Maintain, Survive, and Expand--and where and how they should be investing in the UC market based on this.

The next section will focus on what enterprises should be doing and thinking about as they go on their journey to UC. What are the questions enterprise customers should be asking themselves, what are the suggested ways to get started, and some things they should be doing to ensure success. Hint: it's not all about the technology--it's about the business processes and business cases.

Whether you're an enterprise end user, an IT manager, a vendor, or a reseller/system integrator, I hope to see you at this session--and bring lots of questions.What are the questions enterprise customers should be asking themselves, what are the suggested ways to get started, and some things they should be doing to ensure success.