I have to say that I love the whole concept of Unified Communications, but, after wading through the flood of press and meetings during and post-VoiceCon I keep getting struck with thoughts on what is missing from UC. It is broadly applicable and complex, not the neat little bucket that unified messaging was when it was first talked about. In the early days of UM, our biggest worry was where were the voicemails, faxes and emails being stored? Not so with UC. We have layers of complexity that most companies haven’t begun to think about. Plus we have several industries if you separate data from telecom, which are pushing the concept of unifying communications for the betterment of business and mankind, not just one, so how do we get there from here? Here is where all the vendor hype is. There is made up of real deployments, with ROI, applications working seamlessly together, unhindered on well run and provisioned networks. The middle of here and there is where it gets scary.

I read iLinc’s recent announcement entitled “iLinc Web Conferencing Customers Reduce CO2 Emissions by One Billion Pounds” and was immediately interested. I’m really on the Green bandwagon (although I haven’t bought a Prius), and I’m intently interested in video conferencing’s impact on the user - particularly the unintended impact on the user – those things that companies haven’t dreamed would happen when they introduced their conferencing products.

I checked in with LumenVox this morning, after missing them at SpeechTek last month. With all the press that Microsoft and Nuance get (not that I have anything against either), its still nice to know that other speech technology vendors are not only thriving, but really helping niches in the market.