The business case to prioritize UC interoperability

The multi-platform UC reality

According to a recent report from Landing Platform, most enterprises use an average of 10 or more team-collaboration apps, a staggering number. This fragmentation stems from several common realities that enterprise organizations face, including the demands of hybrid and distributed workforces, tools inherited through acquisitions and phased migrations from legacy on-premises UC systems that are impossible to replace overnight.

As a result, multi-platform environments are the norm rather than the exception. For IT leaders, forcing full standardization on a single platform carries a high risk of disruption and potential vendor lock-in. This makes strong interoperability the only true strategy moving forward.

The hidden cost of UC fragmentation

It is no surprise that juggling multiple UC platforms generates high hidden costs beyond license fees. IT teams face significant increases in support workload and complexity as they manage disparate admin consoles, software update cycles, training, troubleshooting and cybersecurity. From a user perspective, workers suffer from constant context switching, duplicated data and time wasted switching between platforms.

More troubling for IT is the risk and compliance gaps stemming from inconsistent policies, logging and data retention. Data loss prevention tactics become more challenging, often requiring the use of multiple security tools to fill compliance gaps.

Finally, business leaders face their own challenges, including higher total cost of ownership from tools that largely serve the same purpose, more expensive integration and support costs and operational lag among employees. Fragmentation becomes even more pronounced and costly once organizations look to layer AI capabilities onto this already complex UC foundation.

What 'good interoperability' looks like

It's easy to say that strong UC interoperability is a necessity, but defining "good" may vary from one enterprise to another. In some cases, good may mean seamless meeting and chat interoperability via federation settings, consolidated monitoring and unified analytics, robust API support and agentic AI integrations. Other companies might want more secure external collaboration with customers/partners or hardware-based video conferencing interoperability. The goal should not be perfect universal connectivity, but a focus on the organization's highest-priority use cases.

At its core, good interoperability should concentrate on three distinct layers:

1. Identity and access management. Creating a single source of truth for user identity, authentication and access control.
2. Workload connectivity. Seamless interaction across platforms for core UC functions for video meetings, chat and presence.
3. UC governance. Unified visibility into logging, e-discovery and data retention/loss prevention.

For agentic AI readiness and interoperability, prioritize UC platforms that support context sharing and unified orchestration. This ensures that AI agents don't get hung up on violations of security and compliance policies when sensitive information moves between applications. The result is smarter cross-tool automation and analysis that delivers value across the entire UC ecosystem.

Making UC interoperability a priority

Chasing the latest UC innovations without an interoperability plan in place is a recipe for disaster. IT leaders and UC experts should include interoperability as a core requirement for any new UC tool or major upgrade of an existing UC system. Build this discipline into the design and architecture phases of a UC interoperability project. You'll avoid costly retrofitting, eliminate fragmentation, and with little operational disruption, position your organization to adapt to future UC innovations.

Andrew Froehlich is founder of InfraMomentum, an enterprise IT research and analyst firm, and president of West Gate Networks, an IT consulting company. He has been involved in enterprise IT for more than 20 years.