<p>Saying that multi-vendor UC is hard to deploy is as gross an understatement as saying the Yankees overpaid for Jacoby Ellsbury. In both cases it makes sense on paper and may work out OK in the short term, but over the long haul, both may not provide the original value that was sought out.</p><p>Unlike the Yankees, telecom managers now have some help with their problem, as this week Oracle announced the Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker, a product of the acquisition of Acme Packet made earlier this year. The Communications Broker is designed to act almost as a "Rosetta Stone" for the various UC vendors who claim to interoperate with one another, but only do so to a limited extent.</p><p>In its press release, Oracle cited a Frost & Sullivan data point that 69% of enterprises use multiple UC vendors. This may be true in the aggregate, but ZK Research shows that once you get into large enterprises, the number using multiple vendors is over 90%. Even organizations that try and standardize on a single vendor eventually wind up bringing in others.</p><p>For example, I remember talking to one of the IT leaders at a large U.S. bank, who said they had actually tried to standardize an all-Cisco deployment. A few months after making that decision, they acquired a bank that was using Polycom video, and then a few months after that acquired another that was using Avaya's UC platform. They had considered trying to replace every system with Cisco, but the cost would just be too great. Additionally, B2B collaboration is on the rise, and while one might be able to control the internal environment, no company can decide to collaborate only with organizations that have the same UC vendor.</p><p><a href="http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/uc-mess-and-oracles-trying-clean-it">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2013/12/11/new_oracle_enterprise_communications_broker_simplifies.htm">New Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker Simplifies Multi-Vendor Unified ...</a> (HispanicBusiness.com)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dvbeHqf5y18gTJMVic9h3gjUJBDkM&ned=us">8 additional articles.</a></p>