Inside LotusphereInside Lotusphere

The event has shown that social tools are likely to impact your UC plans by changing the end-users' desktop environment, and that the shift to mobile is in full-swing.

Unified Communications was barely mentioned during yesterday's IBM Lotusphere general session, but the event is highlighting several key trends that UC managers should follow.

The first is the integration of UC and social business software into a broader collaboration architecture. UC architects have primarily focused on deploying new applications such as instant messaging, web conferencing, and video; integrating these features with both legacy voice systems as well as desktop applications. Increasingly, though, the desktop is changing as enterprise social platforms featuring Facebook-like user interfaces replace the traditional in-box for internal and external collaboration. IBM, like Cisco with its Quad platform, and Jive with XMPP support, seeks to integrate these social tools with real time services including voice and video: Picture viewing an activity stream and seeing a user's presence, clicking on their name or picture, and initiating a chat or voice call. Or imagine going into a group, seeing who is on-line, and inviting group members to an ad-hoc video chat (think: Google+ Hangouts for business). Indeed IBM demonstrated the capability, along with partner Polycom, to quickly establish a group video chat session.

The challenge for most organizations is not whether or not to deploy social platforms, but that social platforms are being deployed, largely in a disjointed, decentralized manner. Our research shows that while 63% of companies are deploying, planning to deploy, or evaluating social business platforms, these efforts are largely happening outside of IT. Telecom/network groups own the social initiative in just 3% of companies. Application groups own 23% of deployments, while in 18% of companies, marketing functions are driving use; just 20% of companies have a dedicated social planning function--the prerequisite for coordinating social planning with other interrelated activities. Furthermore, most companies have more than one social platform, meaning that for UC managers to integrate real-time functions into the social business strategy, they are likely to have to support not a single enterprise-wide social platform but rather a mix of different tools used by different departments or business units.

The second trend highlighted at Lotusphere is mobility. We've all heard the hype over the iPhone, iPad, and Android-enabled devices leading to growing demand for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) models. IBM, again like Cisco, is stressing its mobile story as it strives to bring its full suite of collaboration capabilities to any device. At Lotusphere one of the general session demos, again with partner Polycom, showed the ability to easily include tablet or smartphone users into video chats using IBM Sametime. IT leaders tell us on average, 10% of their employees are wireless only, up from 7% a year ago. Almost half have adopted BYOD models, while almost 60% are implementing or evaluating mobile device management platforms to enable security and policy management for a BYOD model. Those responsible for UC planning need to include mobility as a key requirement for whatever they are deploying or planning to deploy, and should evaluate vendor approaches for integrating an ever-increasing variety of mobile devices on multiple carrier networks.

Bottom line: Social tools are likely to impact your unified communications plans by changing the end-users' desktop environment. In addition, the shift to mobile devices for communications and collaboration is in full-swing. Get out in front of these trends by understanding the impact of social initiatives in your organization, integration capabilities and approaches among the various social business platform vendors, and plan for greater reliance on mobile devices.