If you're attending this week's Enterprise Connect in Orlando, you can be sure you'll be bombarded with what's quickly becoming this year's hottest tech trend dynamic duo: videoconferencing and unified communications.

With study after study promising spectacular adoption rates of videoconferencing by everything from large enterprises to mom and pop businesses, the volume of news coming out about videoconferencing shouldn't be too surprising.

In fact, more than 10 of the conference sessions feature video (and that's not including keynotes) with topics that range from personal video and mobility to how to keep video from blowing up your network.

More interesting, though, might be the range and volume of unified communications specific offerings that cover the conference schedule from a variety of vendors, despite the somewhat slow uptake--in comparison to videoconferencing--of complete unified communications solutions by business.

There's little question that parts of the UC ecosystem have seen wide adoption across multiple business strata.

But the stumbling blocks, interoperability, proof of solid ROI and lack of understanding continue to be hurdles.

As Sprint's director of product management and development Mike McRoberts told me, while the company's customers have obviously been interested in moving to expand their use of unified communications, the expense-in terms of both capital and IT manpower-has been a major choke point. Companies, he said, wanted to be able to focus their IT departments on the business tasks at hand, rather than on unified communications solutions that, sometimes, offered vague ROI paybacks.

Instead, McRoberts said, they asked Sprint for solutions they could license, but not buy. Invest in UC as they needed it without tying up cash or personnel.

Sprint, one of several companies offering cloud solutions, is rolling out its Complete Collaboration platform today (see related story). (Look for another big entry to join the fray tomorrow.)

McRoberts said Sprint is very aware that the UC market has been stunted.

"When we initially launched SIP trunking (about three years ago), we saw a lot of customers start with a five to 10 percent deployment and then stop," he said. "They either didn't want to tie up infrastructure or cash." But, he points out, business analysts say that the real benefits of unified communications only start to surface when a business does a full UC deployment.

"Most customers just didn't have the structure to make that happen," he said. "What was holding them back was the inability to find the capital to deploy fully.

"What we're doing for them (with Sprint's cloud offering) is helping them finish the deployment. From what we've heard from our customers that have deployed it so far, the results have been very good."

Will businesses discover ROI for unified communications by going to the cloud? An increasing number of vendors believe they will...and they're backing their hunches up with a plethora of new plays.--Jim

Time Warner Cable has decided its time to leave Sprint's services behind and strike out on its own with voice service. While cable companies have long had wholesale agreements with certain carriers, as competition heats up some are looking for ways to bring these lucrative services in house.

A report by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research revealed that Sprint's contract with Time Warner Cable "equates to about $5 per subscriber per month in unadjusted earnings, or about $249 million a year." TWC has over 4 million subscribers using the Sprint system for digital voice service.

Time Warner Cable spokesman Justin Venech would not confirm the exact date when this transition will be completed or what TWC pays Sprint for this service, but some sources say it will be within the next four years. "It improves our economics, but it will take several years to complete," Venech said.

For more:
- see FierceTelecom article
- see the FierceCable article
- see this Zacks.com article

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While Sprint reported wireline revenues of $1.4 billion were down 10 percent year-over-year because of decreases in voice and legacy data services, the IXC's Internet revenues were up 5 percent due in part to increased wholesale VoIP service demand.

Sprint's third quarter Internet revenues were up 5 percent from the third quarter of 2008 and flat sequentially. Sprint claimed the year-over-year increase was from demand for its Global MPLS services as well as demand from cable operators in need of wholesale VoIP service. At the end of the third quarter, Sprint reported it is supporting 4.9 million users of their cable partners VoIP services. While traditional voice declined 14 percent, customers continued to migrate to IP-based services. 

For more:
- read the release here

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