Summary
Unified communication is being touted as the new growth wave that merges IP, telephoiny, messaging, presence, social forum, email into one. It is expected to make life easier for individual and an employee and now has big names like Google promoting it.
Analysis
With IP geting ubiquotous the pure internet plays like Google are making their inroads into the computing and telephony.
With IP connections (more so continous connections e.g. broadband) made vailable on multiple devices e.g. handets, wireless modem, landline and cable modem, enterprise IP etc. companies are making serious endeavour to launch unified communication producs and hosted services.
So far offered by predominantly small companiesm now big name like Google are supporting it too.
Key shall be the implementation cost, merging such hosted app. and widgets with desktop and enterprise applications (more so if legacy) and the ease of use.
If integration issues and device support is sorted, I am confident that ROI will be taken care......
