Ash Report

I was at a Unified Communication forum in KL yesterday. It was organised by IDC with presentation from IBM, Microsoft and Cisco. They were all pushing for their take on Unified Communication - a vision where a person can have a single point of communication integrating various communication channel, be it plain-old-telephone, mobile phone, VOIP, video-call, email, Group collaboration, Instant Messaging, fax.

This is old theme lah, in fact it was a buzzword back in 1999 and the company I was with then also jumped on the bandwagon. In fact UC (as it is now being dearly referred to by the forumers yesterday) has died a slow death since then.

Apparently, UC now is having second lease of life and all three speakers put the blame on the increased state of connectivity in our society - globally. For example, IM (instant messaging) has continued to flourish at the office space despite futile attempt by IT managers to get staff away from chit-chatting via IM. In fact, Malaysia scored a high >75% usage of IM in office space.

The speakers also identified the next generation of work-force to be highly Internet-literate - dubbed Screenagers by the IDC-guy and Digital Native by the IBM guy. These next generation will be hitting the workforce in the next 5 years or so and they typically spent 99% of their waking time facing the screen. They will expect to do work-things online and this is expected to have a big impact on how companies need to adopt to attact this generation as their customers, suppliers and staffs.

Personally I’m not a big fan of do-it-all gadgets and prefer dedicated item for dedicated function. For example, the 4-in-1 printer cum scanner cum copier cum fax is a great idea. But imagine if oneof the function screwed up (which invariably they would) you would lose the functionality of all the others as well.

Likewise, if we use UC - if the system’s IM component got hit with a flu, chances are the whole voice, email and fax will got hit as well. that would be a bloody disaster and for an SME, something that you simply can’t afford to have. So, let’s wait and see whether this UC dream will turn up like 3G’s Video Call flop - or not.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Ash Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.