What exactly is yoo-nuh-fide  kuh-myoo-ni-kay-shuhns (unified communications)? Or should the question, with proper grammar in mind, be asked “what are yoo-nuh-fide  kuh-myoo-ni-kay-shuhns? My personal English professor (otherwise known as Microsoft Word) does not seem to be offering any advice; I guess I will have to deduce this for myself.

To truly answer this grammatical mystery, I must decide whether the subject, unified communications, is singular or plural. From this I can determine whether a singular or plural verb (is or are) is required to make the sentence grammatically correct. Easy enough, right? Not quite.

The point in all the above nonsense is intended to shed light on the ambiguous term that is Unified Communications. I recently asked a room of 10 people to define the term and I received 10 different answers, and EVERYONE was correct. Ultimately, we collectively defined unified communications as “The integration of communication services such as IP Telephony, instant messaging, presence, video and voice conferencing, speech recognition and unified messaging. nified communications is not a single product, but a set of products that enable more cost effective and efficient communications regardless of ones physical location”

There is no question that integrating historically disparate forms of communication services onto a single platform (the IP network) provides significant value to the business. In addition to the well known benefits, I am always amazed at the small things that seem to create the most excitement. One customer was thrilled after a unified communication migration because they could access the paging system to page people in remote offices. Another was pleasantly surprised that the phone system continued to operate during a power outage. The LCD on the Cisco 7971 phones were bright enough to provide light for the office (at least until the UPS died).

Now back to the original question.  Is it more grammatically correct to say “what is unified communications?” OR “what are unified communications”? If you figure this one out, please let me know.