In-house or outsourced? On premise or in the cloud? Such decisions have proven difficult for CIOs and ICT purchasers during the recession, as they have been under severe pressure to contain technology investment risk. Thankfully, for a range of technology areas, a hybrid model to upgrades and investment may provide a lower-risk approach. And unified communications is one technology area that could benefit.

The IT industry is prone to get enthusiastic about emerging technologies. In many cases, this has the positive effect of driving support for technologies that go on to make a tangible difference to business performance or, in some cases, people’s lives.

Look at the way online commerce has enabled enterprises to get better deals from suppliers (using online auctions), and disrupt entire industries, such as travel (low-cost airlines). The enthusiasm of technologists plays its part in driving development of emerging technologies (in this case, e-commerce) and gives birth to standards that can lead to mass adoption.

But by the same token, this enthusiasm sometimes has the unintended consequence of hurting a technology’s chances of being taken seriously. We are all too familiar with Gartner’s Hype Cycle. Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) technologies have over the years suffered from being overhyped. Talked about in various forms since the late 1980s, industry analysts were predicting as recently as 2007 that UCC would become one of the following year’s top strategic technologies .

This year, some are claiming unified communications will come of age . So why should this year be any different from previous false starts? The answer lies with another emerging technology that has suffered from its own share of hype: the cloud.

De-risking post-recession ICT investment

The potential benefits that UCC could deliver have been talked about for years, often breathlessly. But as the world emerges from recession, there is a great deal of optimism that they will now finally benefit from concerted investment. Why?

ABI Research predicts that the UCC market will grow from $302 million in 2008, to a far more impressive $4.3 billion in 2014 . And InStat, another research house, goes even further, saying the market for UCC products and services will be worth $39.7 billion by 2013 .

One of the reasons for this expected growth is that the recession has given those corporate purchasers of managed networked IT services the chance to rethink their own strategies. After a decade where the attitude to IT investment could be summarised by the attitude “we have to have it”, CIOs are now looking afresh at what they actually have to have.

And one of the conclusions many are coming to is that overhauling entire sections of their IT infrastructure may no longer be financially – or politically – viable. It is much better to be able to demonstrate return on investment for low- or no-capex projects such as network optimisation, the adoption of cloud services and partial infrastructure upgrades, where needed.

This is where the idea of UCC technology and the cloud come together at a timely moment. Some difficult decisions have held back UCC investment in recent years. For example, while cost reduction is an imperative, there have been question marks over what is the right technology and product mix to deliver savings but also maintain a reliable, high quality voice and video service.

For example, the decision to invest in cloud-based UCC architecture has proven tricky. While enterprise cloud UCC architectures may look unproven, on-premise implementations look ever more likely to become obsolete within a short period, if cloud services do take off. Meanwhile, there are concrete arguments for moving to the cloud, such as inherent scalability, and the price flexibility built into the pay-as-you-use model in any competitive environment.

Choosing between traditional PBX vendors or applications poses another dilemma. Even if you are confident in the direction of travel the technology will take in the long term, with IT budgets under severe scrutiny, making short-term decisions has become difficult.

Finally, the recession itself has posed questions, as organisations have sought to cut costs and find new, more efficient ways of working. Imagine you are a CIO who is already looking at how better to utilise mobile and home working to save operational business costs: it makes it more difficult to make investment decisions when key technical questions about remote access requirements and network loading remain unanswered.

Hybrid models for unified communications investment

Thankfully, an answer to these questions has begun to emerge thanks to the direction of travel of cloud technologies. The cloud is beginning to pose CIOs not with simplistic questions like “should I use the cloud or not”, but more nuanced ones, like “which services should I place in the cloud, which should I keep on-premise, and how should I combine these?”

In the area of cloud services, hybrid models are emerging. Federators are combining multiple cloud offerings, providing more tailored services, more integrated security, and better service level agreements than are possible by shopping around the individual providers. These federators are also able to combine private clouds and existing on-premise services, with those located in the public cloud.

This approach means that CIOs do not have to worry about being locked into one set of technology solutions, but can rather see immediate technology investments as a stage in a progressive migration path that focuses on strategic business needs. It means, in effect, CIOs can break down big decisions into smaller, less risky ones. And as UCC moves into the cloud, these benefits are beginning to apply to UCC technology investment too.

Unified-communications-as-a-service

Customers fall into different camps, based on their networked IT heritage and networked communications requirements. For example, some use traditional PBX-based architectures, while others use more modern IP infrastructures. Some aim to integrate voice services, while others are seeking to converge multiple communications channels so they become a single platform.

Making the right investment decision depends on heritage and requirements, and also on the culture within individual organisations, such as how far users are given the freedom to choose their own methods of communication within the enterprise. But, CIOs also need to be aware of the changes that are happening to UCC technologies.

Just as networked IT resources are becoming available as federated and hybrid cloud services – whether software-, platform-, or infrastructure-as-a-service – so UCC is becoming available in the same way. CIOs no longer need to choose between applications or PBX architecture. Solutions based on a mixture of customer-owned and hosted services are being developed by UCC federators. Hence new services can now be embedded into existing infrastructure.

The impact on CIOs will be to reduce the requirement for capital expenditure, and reduce technology obsolescence risk. CIOs will be able to build tailored on-premise and cloud-based services to suit their near-term needs, safe in the knowledge that they have the flexibility to reflect their future needs.

It does not come without any risks at all; an investment roadmap and clear target architecture remain essential. These should be pragmatic and realistic, but they don’t have to be based on single product families or single clouds. A mixed environment is not only possible; it is likely to be a lower-risk solution, particularly for the medium term.

Building these target architectures and roadmaps is where understanding the software-as-a-service and communication-as-a-service markets, and the technical challenges brought about by the integration of these cloud services with on-premise technology, is essential.

The challenge for CIOs looking at UCC afresh is to investigate how cloud delivery is changing the playing field, how the new models fit more closely with the new enterprise economics, and ultimately, how they can start down a path that gives them future flexibility.