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.

Interactive Intelligence announced their 3.0 release for Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) with lots of new functionality, including integration to Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, and some features to simplify deployment. But the new security features and speech technology function were what caught my eye.

I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.

It’s December. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, plus I’m not a unified communications vendor, so I don’t have a New Year’s resolution list for how I can help further the development of unified communications. I also don’t care to blog about my UC predictions for 2008, as there are plenty of others out there who will probably do that. However, I’m capable of believing in Santa, and as one of my friend’s tells her children when they ask her about Santa - “You have to believe to receive.” So, I thought I would put together my wish list for the Twelve Days of Unified Communications, with some help from my friends in the industry. I talked to a dozen or so vendors on what they would like to see happen in UC in 2008, and whether they had any input as to how they are helping further these wishes. Not surprisingly, in many cases these wishes reflected their own ongoing initiatives or pet peeves (attributions of which I have left off for reasons of anonymity). However, for the most part they tended to have a lot of commonality in what they wish for.

Last week ShoreTel held its first industry analyst conference, in San Francisco. This was a good thing, as the subject of my blog, brand recognition, involves the analyst community too. I’m assuming the majority of my colleagues know who ShoreTel is – a purveyor of VoIP switches, contact center, and unified communications software – but I bet that not many of them previously knew ShoreTel to the depths we went last week. Even I didn’t, although I have to admit I should have as I’m married to a ShoreTel reseller, hear about them all the time, and use their products every day.

It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

Last week when Blair Pleasant and I had finished our UC end user benefits study we did a webinar on the findings that was sponsored by Genesys and CMP. Out of that we had a number of follow up questions from the audience, including quite a few from our colleague Art Rosenberg, who posted a review of the study on UC Strategies.com.