UC Road DivergesUC Road Diverges

In his Keynote speech at VoiceCon, Avaya CEO Lou D'Ambrosio said unified communications tools should be given to the masses. I'm not sure I agree with his theory that such a move will get us out of the current economic slump, but I wholeheartedly support the notion of giving UC applications to all knowledge workers who currently have e-mail. To me, that's the best way to size the potential market for UC as well.But interestingly, I would suggest that those kind of horizontal deployments run counter to the customer-centric view that has been offered by so many vendors at the conference this week. I think what we're seeing is a divide in the UC arena: one the one had, UC is about communication, and locating the right person at the right instant in order to get access to information right now (that's the customer-centric, or contact center model); on the other hand, UC is about connecting far-flung co-workers inside and outside organizations, finding ways to support virtual collaboration among them, and then managing and leveraging the resulting work product.Those two models are really different, and they should lead to very distinct technology deployments. What do you think? Have we reach a fork in the UC road?