To realize the value of unified communications, most enterprises will have to integrate new communications solutions within existing infrastructures. Because some legacy systems will not offer a clear onramp to unified communications, an organization will want to evaluate vendors based on their abilities to minimize disruption by leveraging existing infrastructure and user experience, as well as their ability to help weigh the business, technical and product considerations that would yield the right solution to meet the organization's needs.

In doing so, enterprises will want to assess the breadth of integration options and the depth of integration. Options should encompass all communications applications that can be unified: telephony, messaging, mobility, presence and conferencing. A full complement of features will ensure those of critical importance to your organization can be readily deployed.

Avaya and IBM have leveraged their considerable individual technologies and platforms and roadmaps to create a combined vision to make real-time and non-real-time collaboration a reality for enterprises. Integrating the powerful communications applications from Avaya with market-leading IBM Lotus software for business applications, results in unity of communications. This unity removes the barriers of time, geography, isolated applications, messaging formats, communication modes, and choice of device. Information and communications are then liberated from virtually any access limitation. The mantra of anytime-and-anywhere communications is now being united with any way.