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.

he 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.