So clearly enterprises understand the potential complexity of Unified Communications, and believe that complexity isn’t being adequately addressed today. And there’s definitely a need for it to be addressed, based on the responses to another question Nemertes asked. When Nemertes asked whether the end user’s VOIP vendor would also be its UC vendor, the majority answered No—by a margin of almost 58% to 42%.

“What people are having a hard time with is predicting ahead of time how to design and optimize” any business process re-engineering, let alone one that tries to incorporate communications into its value proposition, Henry noted. Companies have learned by now, through hard experience, that you don’t buy a technology and assume that the business processes to use that technology effectively will just follow.

As a typical example, Henry noted that it would, indeed, be of measurable value to a pharmaceutical firm to re-engineer processes such that drugs can get to FDA approval 6 months faster; or for an insurance company to be able to settle claims in 24 hours instead of several days. The problem is building the process that will really get you to that result. “That’s hard work and frankly takes a bit of a leap of faith,” he said.

In reality, of course, video is becoming more important in the way enterprises actually do business. That leads John B. to ask the question: Given that voice and video are both real-time apps, will it always make sense to prioritize voice over video? And he leaves it as a question, keeping open the possibility that there may be a technical reason not to relegate voice to the second-class position—i.e., ahead of all non-real-time apps but behind video. That’s because we’re really in new territory here; we’ve never before questioned the notion that high video quality was a nice-to-have but high voice quality was a necessity.

Allan’s post focuses on Dell as a sales and support channel for Unified Communications, and you do have to wonder if the UC market won’t commoditize, both on the hardware and software side, faster than the PBX vendors can adjust—at least at the lower end. But if a Dell smartphone became a cost buy versus the more full-featured iPhone and the various Blackberries, would that win it much enterprise business? Again, maybe at the price-sensitive low end (though, granted, today everybody’s price sensitive everywhere). How willing would the road warriors be to give up their premium devices?