Moving from Push to Pull for UC

There were two interesting announcements this week on the unified communications front.  NEC announced today an agreement with Unisys whereby Unisys will integrate NEC's products into Unisys's communications and collaboration portfolio.  Meanwhile, earlier this week HP announced a new services portfolio for unified communications, bundling its own offerings (such as Halo telepresence) with products and platforms from partners including Cisco and Microsoft.

I think these moves reflect a rapidly changing landscape for UC in that buying demand is increasingly coming from end users, not from IT.  Most vendors and providers now realize that their best hope of growing in the UC market comes not from push-selling to IT, but rather from creating pull-based demand by working directly with lines of business to assist them in using UC to solve specific business challenges and improve bottom line results.  We've seen a pretty dramatic trend in the last year, it's rare now that I hear a UC vendor talk about product features.  Rather, we now get buzzwords like "Business Transformation" as the driver for UC.

Given this new reality, it's not surprising at all that the system vendors increasingly are looking to grow partnerships with companies in the application space who often have a better understanding of specific business and vertical challenges and opportunities, and who have contacts with end users and lines of business.