And in any event the unprecedented scale of mergers and acquisitions in the financial sector is bound to create lots of work for IT managers forced to integrate systems–but may also slow investment if those mergers come with cost-cutting, job-eliminating moves. Furthermore, companies will also be on the lookout for technology duplication

With Nortel stock trading near historic lows and the Canadian vendor already announcing plans to divest its Metro Ethernet unit, is it time for Microsoft to revisit the idea of acquiring Nortel’s enterprise business? Let’s be clear about one thing: The only real reason for Microsoft to buy Nortel’s PBX line is account control, and the issue isn’t so much about immediate enterprise purchases, but about long-term strategy. Unfortunately, it’s realistic to expect that the market for IP-PBXs will slow down or worse as the economy as a whole slows down or worse.

One of the many good questions that Wainhouse Research asked enterprises in its most recent survey was: How broadly will you deploy Unified Communications capabilities? It didn’t surprise me that the majority of respondents–55%–said they’d roll out just some capabilities to select employees. This has been the conventional wisdom about UC for some time now. What did surprise me was the significant size–22%–of the sample that said they’d deploy all capabilities to everyone. Almost a quarter of the enterprises in the Wainhouse survey expect to do a blanket UC rollout, in spite of the fact that they are statistically unlikely to have even completed a blanket IP telephony rollout yet. Those are some mighty forward-thinking people.

How should you plan for investments in Unified Communications, and how will that planning be affected by the current difficult economy? Even in the midst of a tough economy, is it time to start investing in UC? And if you do, how should you go about it–where do you start within the enterprise, what do you deploy, how do you justify what you do (or don’t do)? In short, how do you build a business case for UC (and also, still, for IP-telephony)?

Cisco’s announcement last week that it’s acquiring email vendor PostPath for $215 million put the spotlight on a technology that had begun to seem passe. Microsoft accused Cisco of denigrating the importance of email in the past, while Cisco countered that it’s always seen email as part of the continuum “from text to TelePresence,” as Cisco’s Joe Burton said last week.