Three tips for UC deployment

But the landscape is still confusing to many enterprise IT folks, who struggle to weigh the cost and necessity of UC solutions while also devising an attack strategy.

Burton Group senior analyst Mark Cortner and Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president with Yankee Group, offer three tips to get enterprises rolling on their unified communications strategy.

"The entry point into the UC discussion is commonly concurrent with a migration to

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IP telephone, an IP PBX or a next-generation voicemail solution," Cortner said, noting that legacy PBXs, for many companies, are reaching the end-of-life stage, and traditional voicemail solutions are in need of an update to some form of unified messaging.

Where the confusion starts, however, is whether to attack IP telephony and unified communications as an all-in-one upgrade or to parcel it out into a series of projects. The former, Cortner said, can work well for the SMB, where "doing both at once isn't so difficult." For the large enterprise, however, an upgrade to IP telephony rolled into a unified communications deployment may be too much to tackle in one fell swoop.

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