Gartner: Unified comms 'greatest scam since Ponzi'

Unified communications represents little more than a bundle of the various things vendors want to sell companies, a Gartner analyst has claimed.

Nick Jones told an audience at last week's Gartner Symposium in Sydney that 'unified communications' — which Wikipedia defines as the "integration of real-time communication services... with non-real-time communication services" — had no really clear definition and was the "greatest scam since Ponzi", according to a report in Computerworld Australia.

He also said consumer services such as Skype and Twitter had already made business-focused unified communications services redundant.

"Why would you want to trap young people with dinosaur communications when they've already got something better?" Jones is quoted as saying. "Most unified communications systems can't even show you tweets, let alone where they are coming from."