Survivor's Guide to 2007: Messaging & Collaboration: Page 6 of 9

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What's certain is both IBM and Microsoft lack experience with voice and PBXs and must look to partners. Microsoft has Nortel, but could still play the field. If Cisco chooses to partner with IBM, that will give Notes/SameTime a much-needed boost.

The most often cited reasons for delaying a UC adoption are complexity of setup and integration and reliability concerns. If your UC system goes down, employees lose all forms of communication. There's no room for error. Data networks must be redesigned for robustness. Servers for UC services must be made highly available via clustering and load balancing. Virtualization can allow for faster swap-outs and quick restoration of services, but the pieces for this complex architecture will likely come from many different vendors, so if something breaks, there will be finger pointing. Make guaranteed integration with your planned UC environment a must-have for new purchases.

Companies that have both IP and TDM telephony are a different animal altogether--integrating UC with TDM is at best just plain ugly. Consider holding off on UC until you're almost completely weaned off TDM.

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