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The battle for unified collaboration: telecoms vs software companiesProduct Type: Market Research ReportPublished by: Ovum Plc Published: January 2007 Product Code: R464-151 Description Equipment vendors in the telecoms sector are increasingly talking about ‘unified communications’. For the telecoms vendors the term unified communications implies an applications set that extends beyond voice into the collaboration space traditionally occupied by the major desktop software vendors such as IBM and Microsoft. The term also recognises that communications can be from a wide range of devices over both fixed and mobile networks and that, for many end users, the ‘desktop’ will increasingly become a portable mobile device. At the same time, Microsoft is committed to extending its own collaboration capabilities into key components of the enterprise voice space traditionally occupied by the telecoms vendors.The increasing convergence of these two areas is starting to define a new space - unified collaboration. From a technology perspective this convergence has been driven by the adoption of IP, and is now being greatly accelerated by the almost universal support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) by both the telecoms and collaboration software players. This report investigates the communication and collaboration offerings from both the telecoms and software communities. The obvious area of contention is the grey area between the functions that are clearly part of the typical software collaboration suite, and those that are becoming extensions of the telecoms vendors’ unified communications offerings. As an increasing number of vendors in the telecoms sector are already delivering enterprise software for collaboration, the battleground runs right up to the end user. Given the dominance of the telecoms community in realtime communication areas such as voice and video it is unlikely that they will yield their position easily. Similarly, the software sector owns the desktop and will not give that up either. The only practical solution is for the two to work together to offer the best of both worlds in comprehensive unified collaboration solutions. Table of Contents Key messagesFrom communication to collaboration The information exchange continuum The main participants The collaboration tools Ovum model for collaboration software Software vendor activities Activities in the telecoms sector Consumer tools The battleground Sector functionality overlaps Telecoms sector vs software sector The collaboration space will be strongly fought over Microsoft’s ambitions in enterprise voice The importance of presence From unified communications to unified collaboration Table of figures Figure 1 From communication to collaboration Figure 2 The starting point Figure 3 Overlap of features and functions in software and telecoms Figure 4 The collaboration software stack Figure 5 Average software vendors’ offerings Figure 6 Average telecoms sector offerings Figure 7 Functionality overlap Figure 8 The battleground for collaboration |
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