Discussions of Unified Communications (UC) are often focused on the unification of the user experience, making it easy to escalate communications from point-point IMs to telephony to video to rich multimedia conferencing.

However, the whole industry is moving towards integration of UC into business applications and processes, in the contact center, at the branch and in fact across the entire financial institution via the data center. This is all about decreasing the human delay that today slows down these processes.

In addition, if unification only takes place at the client level, you may still be faced with a complex set of disparate systems in the back end: voicemail, email, audio conferencing, web conferencing, video conferencing, IM/presence and telephony.

Unification of the UC infrastructure around software is critical from both business and IT perspectives. The ability to integrate UC with business processes can be severely hampered, unless the UCs ‘application’ can flexibly integrate with business applications. The business case of unifying the client experience can be blown away, if traditional technology silos are maintained in the IT infrastructure.

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is an emerging industry standard for application development. SOA is based on a style of architecture that uses loosely coupled services and components, and provides a modular ‘develop once, and re-use many times’ approach to application development. A method for implementing SOA is Web Services, an extremely pervasive and widely adopted technology. Adopting a SOA and Web Services framework for communications enablement of business processes allows enterprises to fully leverage a large developer ecosystem for business advantage.

Using an industry standard is one method that many users have found to offer certain advantages. A network centric vertically integrated approach is another path that some firms have selected. This path creates interdependencies between the network infrastructure and applications, complicating the enablement. When heading into a SOA environment, understanding the standards vs. proprietary paths is one important consideration to take.

Presenting a consistent set of services (e.g. click to connect, notification, presence, queries) allows business processes to be communications enabled in a way that is independent of the underlying infrastructure. Furthermore, these services can be defined in such a way as to be provided by infrastructures from many vendors and spanning enterprise and service provider environments.

Financial institutions should assess how various UC suppliers unify the user experience with tight integration with desktop applications; how they leverage UC to enhance the customer experience; how they provide an open SOA-enabled environment for communications enablement, and how they propose to unify the UC IT infrastructure. A software-centric approach to UC provides enterprises the agility to accelerate application innovation and leads to the next level of data and voice consolidation.

Tony Rybczynski is Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies at Nortel, 613-763-6975; email: tonyryb@nortel.com; web: www.hyperconnectivity.com. Visit Tony’s blog, “The Hyperconnected Enterprise”at: http://blog.tmcnet.com/the-hyperconnected-enterprise/