Slowly but surely, SMBs are increasingly turning to unified communications (UC) technologies to improve productivity and shorten response times of businesses-critical decisions, according to a new report by AMI-Partners.

Still, AMI says that SMBs are only just scratching the surface of UC, picking and choosing individual UC components rather than realizing its full potential as an integrated technology.

“Whether using Skype on their smartphones, or installing in-house IP-PBXs or using Web conferencing services, SMBs are clearly signaling their desire to utilize all available communications and collaboration solutions,” says AMI Partners VP Sanjeev Aggarwal in a statement. “However, SMBs are not familiar with the notion of unified communications, nor are they aware of the various platforms being cobbled together through acquisitions in the IT space.”

The fact that no one, fully integrated UC platform has emerged as a market leader is the single-biggest obstacle to widespread UC adoption at SMBs, the report said. AMI identified Cisco, Microsoft and “possibly” Google as the likeliest vendors to do so in the coming months and years.

Another reason SMBs may not be wholeheartedly jumping into UC, in my opinion, is the difficulty in determining ROI. At SMBs especially, justifying a quick ROI on any new technology is critical to getting management on board. ROI is even more important for a technology so potentially disruptive to traditional, deeply entrenched communications technologies, as UC is.

The ROI of UC, however elusive, is not unattainable, at least according to UC vendors. At VoiceCon in August, I attended a session by reps from INX, ShoreTel and Microsoft, all of whom had some good advice on calculating ROI of UC. The vendors said it is important to understand there are different ROI criteria for different types of workers and that the first step in evaluating UC is to quantify likely “hard” savings.

Check out the full post I wrote back then summarizing their recommendations here. And for those of you who’ve already launched an integrated UC solution, share the wealth. How did you determine likely ROI and, more importantly, were your forecasts on target?

Being the busy, frugal SMB IT professional that you are, you’re always looking for ways to do things quicker and cheaper. When it comes to phone service, that might mean switching to VoIP. 

After all, VoIP is generally easier to manage and less expensive than traditional landline service. What you sacrifice in call quality, your reasoning goes, you more than make up for in setup time and cost. 

But what else would you be willing to sacrifice? If you could get VoIP service completely free of charge, would you allow your service provider to eavesdrop on your calls? One company, Pudding Media of San Jose, is hoping you will. 

According to a report in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, Pudding is offering free Internet phone service in exchange for the right to listen in on calls in order to display relevant advertisements on users’ computer screens based on the content of conversations, in real time. 

This is how it works, as reported in the Times: 

Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking. 

A conversation about movies, for example, will elicit movie reviews and ads for new films that the caller will see during the conversation. … 

Funny, I was just thinking that between the National Security Agency and corporate marketers, there really aren’t enough organizations spying on my every movement and monitoring my every word. 

Seriously, when I read this yesterday I thought it was a joke. Who in their right mind would willingly let a startup media company listen to their most intimate conversations just to save $25 a month? Not to mention, how creepy would it be when, after casually mentioning on a call to a friend or colleague the snack you had at the movies last night, an ad for Junior Mints or Jujy Fruit popped up on your laptop screen?

I know SMBs — actually, companies of all sizes — are always looking for ways to save a few bucks. But this is just too much of a sacrifice. Granted, the Pudding service is not aimed at the enterprise market, but if the company gets even one organization to use this in a corporate setting, I’d be shocked. 

As for consumers, I really hope most people value their privacy enough to resist the temptation of free phone service. If not, and Pudding proves a success, society will have lost yet another battle in the larger war to protect personal privacy, and we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

I spotted them this afternoon as I was perusing my VoiceCon conference agenda. There they were, those three little letters that can make or break any IT project: ROI.

Calculating the ROI of any proposed application or service is often essential to convincing management to fund the IT project in question. Unified communications (UC) is no exception.

At a session dedicated to determining the ROI of UC, reps from systems integrator INX, IP telephony vendor ShoreTel, and the ubiquitous Microsoft offered their advice:

• Look for hard savings first. How much less per month will it cost to maintain a UC system, versus your current, traditional communications tools?
• Then look into productivity gains. And be specific. If you determine deploying UC will improve productivity by 5%, how will workers spend that extra time?
• Recognize that ROI is different for different types of workers. For knowledge workers, ROI is best measured by looking at end results: increased sales and revenue, for instance. For contact center workers on the other hand, ROI depends on reducing transaction times. For example, how many more transactions per hour do you expect call center reps to take thanks to UC?
• Consider the future. Microsoft predicts the costs of VoIP will be reduced by half within three years. Be sure to take into account market factors like this when trying to determine the ROI of UC.

On Wednesday morning here at VoiceCon, Siemens and IBM announced a new OEM agreement that lets IBM license Siemens’ unified communications (UC) application, OpenScape. IBM plans to use OpenScape to improve upon its own Lotus UC offering, called Unified Telephony. 

After the announcement, I sat down with Andy Chew, Siemens senior VP for unified communications, and James Lawton, Siemens VP of strategic system integration. We talked a little about the IBM OEM, but what interested me more were their thoughts on the state of the UC market and Siemens’ approach to SMBs. 

Chew, who’s based in the U.K., told me that he thinks the UC market is still “immature,” but that migrating to UC should nonetheless be a priority for SMBs. In addition to improving communication capabilities and lowering costs, SMBs can adopt UC with little risk if they opt for the hosted services or SaaS route, he said. 

Siemens currently offers hosted versions of its UC offerings, which SMBs can purchase on a monthly basis. If a customer decides Siemens’ OpenScape is not for them, for example, it can simply drop it without having to worry about breaking any long-term contract. 

As for security, Lawton assured me that at Siemens “security is at the base of everything.” While I can’t verify that independently (at least not from the floor of VoiceCon), it’s encouraging at least that a major UC vendor like Siemens seems to recognize the importance of security, especially for SMBs that might not have the resources to withstand a devastating cyberattack.  

Security, Lawton said, “is a mantra for us.” Amen to that.

Greetings from sunny San Francisco! I’m here this week for VoiceCon, where unified communications (UC) is the hot topic. The conference started in earnest on Tuesday morning, and so far includes a nice mix of technical advice as well as higher-level discussions (and debates) about the future of UC.  

One of the first sessions of the conference actually covered an even more basic topic: Just what do we mean by unified communications in the first place? While difficult to define, after taking in a number of the presentations here, this is my stab at it: 

Essentially, an enterprise UC environment is one in which network users can easily determine one another’s availability and communicate with one another using any number of tools (be it IM or VoIP , for example), whichever is most convenient at the time.  

The key to achieving value from UC in the enterprise, most here agree, is the ability to embed UC directly into business processes. For example, with UC capabilities built in, an account manager can not only identify but also get in touch with a colleague or customer directly through Salesforce.com. He or she can see if the person they need to talk to is online or not, figure out the best way to get in touch with that person, and with a click of a mouse do just that. 

The bottom line: UC is all about improving communication effectiveness.  

But I want to know what you think. Got a better definition for unified communications? Well, speak up and let’s get the conversation started!

If everyone on the planet jumped up and down at the same time, would the orbit of the earth shift? I doubt it. But I do know that if millions of people try to log in to their Skype accounts at the same time, it can knock the peer-to-peer Internet telephony service out of action for days. 

How do I know? Because that’s exactly what happened last week.  

For those unawares, Skype’s network crashed last Thursday, leaving its 220 million users without service for nearly two full days. The company, which is a division of the online auction giant eBay, initially blamed the outage on a “software issue,” while some bloggers speculated that a more sinister cause, namely a DoS attack, was behind the crash. 

Service was finally restored on Saturday morning, and today Skype’s Villu Arak explained on his Heartbeat blog what really took the network down: 

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update. 

File this incident under “unintended consequences.” I can just picture the millions upon millions of Windows users dutifully downloading their weekly update, restarting their machines and expecting all to be right with the world. Instead, they unwittingly shuttered, at least temporarily, one of Web 2.0’s most celebrated progeny. 

For parent company eBay, its response (or lack thereof) seems to have caused more damage to its reputation than the service outage itself did to Skype’s network. 

On GigaOM, blogger Om Malik writes: 

And in this moment of crisis, eBay’s senior management was AWOL. Ebay and Skype management are happy to talk to the press when delivering the good news, but in this crisis situation, the silence was deafening. 

Perhaps more ominous for Skype’s future advances into the SMB and enterprise markets are comments like these, posted on the All VoIP News blog:    

After the recent Skype outage I certainly would not use Skype for my business. If Windows updates cause millions of people to reboot their computers, and thus Skype is effected, there is something wrong. 

Ultimately, I don’t think you can blame Skype for failing to anticipate such a fluke occurrence as a network outage caused by millions of users rebooting their computers after a routine Windows Update. I know I certainly didn’t see it coming, and I doubt anyone else did either. Internet telephony is still a work in progress, and snafus like this are bound to happen from time to time.  

But Skype users certainly have a right to expect a better response and better customer service when such a drastic event does happen, especially from a major IT player like eBay. For its SMB users especially, those who depend on Skype to conduct daily business, anything less can prove costly. Maybe too costly to take a chance on a VoIP service like Skype in the first place 

So in addition to “unintended consequences,” here’s hoping eBay and Skype also file this incident under “lessons learned.”

Nortel and IBM announced this week that they’re launching a VoIP system specifically for SMBs. ITNews.com has a good preview here, as does Search400.com. TelecomWeb notices the joint announcement sounds awfully familiar to a partnership Nortel formed with Microsoft last year and wonders what Cisco’s response might be.