Centralization has the edge in TCO, but other business requirements may push you toward distributed. Is convergence just about having an IP phone on your desk or a telephony soft client in your briefcase? No! It's about enabling new applications that allow you to communicate more effectively with colleagues, partners and customers. Unified communications, or what Gartner Group has called "always-on integrated communications," is made up of elements that include asynchronous communications (email, voice mail, video streaming, short message services) and synchronous communications (instant messaging, business telephony, real-time video and application sharing), utilizing presence capabilities. "Always-on" implies connectivity anytime, anywhere, anyhow, and "integrated" implies a common look and feel adapted to the device used and to the available capabilities. Figures 1 and 2 compare a conventional IP telephony deployment with the unified communications functionality.
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