I do — and it’s a communications platform that centers around asynchronous messaging with intuitive capabilities for real-time communications.
As I consider what we call unified communications today, I think of Pony Express riders passing telegraph lines under construction. While its benefits are irrefutable, UC is becoming obsolete. The industry will soon transition to social-based conversations, with early versions of the supporting technology available from Unify and Cisco plus Slack and a slew of other startups.
The shift represents more than technological changes. It also represents a transition from exclusive to inclusive, from integrated to unified, and from being complementary to workflow to being central to it.
Email & UC: Similar But Not Equal
UC introduced the concept of multimodal conversations by bringing instant messaging and sometimes video into the conversation. But email remained separate. Modern enterprise communications effectively includes two types of electronic conversations: email and UC. Two types of conversations that can occur anytime, anywhere, on any device. Two types of lightly integrated conversations.