The question isn’t whether this is a good idea, or even whether it’s a bad idea because you want to be able to escape scrutiny. The question is how much the enterprise should be willing to pay to make it happen. If we’re not there yet, we’re moving closer to a new environment, one where enterprise decision-makers have to look at their end users and say: I’m not going to give these people every conceivable device and means of connectivity—what does this person or class of worker *need*? If they’re primarily mobile, do we eliminate their desk phone—even if they do spend some time at a desk? If they spend a lot of time crossing fixed-mobile or private-public network borders, do we track that device across the different networks, or do we make do with less than ideal connectivity?

I think this is an honest assessment of the world where IP telephony and Unified Communications meet (or don’t meet) today. By keeping out of the telephony platform wars, IBM is doing a service to the industry, because it is in IBM’s interest, given SUT’s positioning, to recognize and grapple with the multivendor, highly diverse and complex telephony environments that virtually all enterprises have and will continue to have for quite some time. IBM’s answer isn’t: Migrate your telephony to our UC platform. It’s: Our UC platform works with your telephony environment.

And why this matters is, it shows that Cisco isn’t ceding an inch to Microsoft in the Unified Communications market. The conventional wisdom has been that Microsoft has the inside track of the Unified Communications race because they “own” the user desktop in most enterprises. And the argument is that they “own” that desktop because their email client and office applications dominate those desktops. But what if those two applications—email and office apps—aren’t actually the key to winning the desktop in the future?

The enterprise is another matter. Consumers may be looking to take complexity out of their voice communications, using a special-purpose device when they do desire voice calling. But if your business is on the other end of that call, you may not have the same need for simplicity of treatment. You never did: You had key systems or PBXs or ACDs to route calls coming from people who, at the other end of the line, were shouting to their spouses, “I got it on the upstairs phone! You can hang up now!”