Mobility is Key for Business Unified Communications

There's a really simple reason why mobile devices are destined to play a key, perhaps the key role, as unified communications develops. At least 41 percent of the workforce already is mobile, and just about every employee is a mobile user in their personal roles. So to the extent unified communications almost always the ability to send and receive communications on mobile and desktop devices, mobility is a virtual requirement, even for workers who are not "mobile" in the normal course of their work day.

"There are lots of ways people communicate now," notes Sphere Communications SVP Todd Landry. "What does it mean to unify all that?" Some might say it means different media types can be more tightly integrated with other forms, Landry says. "At the lowest level, you want multiple forms of communications unified, plus mobile and desktop integration. "At another level, it might mean availability of presence state and text messaging, voice and video, so calls are handled differently depending on what you are doing," Landry says. "At a still higher level, it is communications integrated with business processes."

"Traversing between work and personal roles, your presence and control might move between domains," he says. "So the mobile phone is probably the most important device to support." First of all it is ubiquitous. And it will become a more important tool for business users, simply because device power is growing so fast. Mobile devices now allow users to do "the same sorts of things you do on your PC, and yet we call one a "phone" and the other a "PC," Landry notes.