I’m hearing this more and more from people: why isn’t communications enabled business process (CEBP) the same thing as Unified Communications(UC)?

In short, it’s about focus.  If you look at any demonstration of UC from Microsoft, Cisco or Seimmens, you notice right away that they are focusing on the person. They are handling phone calls, promoting chat sessions to voice calls, viewing the presence and online status of their co-workers, etc.  UC seeks to make the person more productive, and provides easy ways for the person to handle increasingly complex communications situations. (Almost makes you wonder if they are making communications more complex in order to sell you ways to make it less complex.)   This is all important stuff, but it’s not CEBP.

CEBP focuses on making the business process more effective using voice.  The classic example is late payment notifications delivered over a phone.  Every day, the CRM runs through the list of late accounts, and then sends a voice message to the offending customers reminding them to send a check in.  In this case, there’s no call for an employee to handle – the system makes the call. There’s no online status to check – the recipient of the call is outside the walls.  The star of CEBP is other pieces of application software.

Is this just a semantic argument? Couldn’t the UC guys just jigger something up for the same functionality?  Well, I’m sure they will, but I doubt they’ll be long term successful, because there’s just too many fundamental differences:

• UC is an application in and of itself; CEBP exists to make other applications better.
• The primary UC control interface is presented to the user in the form of web pages and clients; the primary CEBP control interface is an API.
• UC solutions contain value in the complexity they handle in call flows, status and such; CEBP solutions contain value in how easy they are to integrate with other applications.
• UC solutions assume that they are the star of the show, and if not – it’s the user; CEBP solutions assume that the application they are enhancing is the star.

You can call that rock a dog all you want, but don’t expect it to go fetch your slippers.  Even though Unified Communications has become the catch all term for all things Enterprise communications related, its’ not CEBP.