Your mobile workforce, business processes and interactions across the wide world of social media demand a UC strategy. This isn't a plug-and-play proposition, but rather a far-sighted enterprise vision that requires expertise that stretches wide and deep.

For many enterprises, the experience of unified communications began with their transition to voice-over-IP services from traditional PBX systems. And sometimes, it ended there, too. The business was happy to get some new efficiencies out of IP telephony, such as voicemail-to-email delivery, and IT congratulated itself on delivering considerable cost savings.

But why stop there? CIOs have an opportunity to show they can reap greater value by expanding investments in unified communications (UC) platforms. They can drive their collaborative and customer processes to accelerate business when expectations for instant and informed interactivity are high. In this context, UC is less about squeezing out a few more costs, and more about systematically solving real business challenges to improve overall business performance. It's about transforming how the business itself operates in concert with-and in response to-trends that include a more mobile and remote workforce, an explosion in social media, and the growth of high-definition (HD) video endpoints as video communications traffic is expected to increase sevenfold from 2009 to 2014.