A lot of vendors have been hawking their UC solutions in recent months. Perhaps Microsoft’s solution released last year is indeed sparking the market.

But whenever I ask a vendor what UC entails, the response is never clear to me. Generally, I’ll get a long silence followed by the business benefits of deploying a UC solution.

Microsoft describes the concept (question: is it a concept or a solution?) as “bridg(ing) the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice, and conferencing to the desktop environment.”

But what about presence? For a while, that was considered the hot item in a UC suite, though is it particularly common?

So far, everyone agrees that UC consists of unified messaging - email, SMS, and voicemail all retrievable from a common location. But what role should web conferencing and audio conferencing play in a UC suite?

As UC is relatively new, I understand that there aren’t a lot of standards around it. At the same time, it seems that some vendors bandy a UC solution that is, in fact, merely an aspect of Unified Communications.

Wherever you go
Whatever you do
I will be right here waiting for you
Whatever it takes
Or how my heart breaks
I will be right here waiting for you

If I ever form a company that provides unified communications, this will be my logo:

If the all-seeing eye is too big brotherish, I’ll just use a picture of Richard Marx looking forlorn.

Still, UC in principle unsettles me. I like the idea of unified messaging and the integration of otherwise-unwieldy contact information, but presence indicators have a creep factor that I suppose I’m going to have to get used to.

That’s because according to a Datamonitor report entitled Trends to Watch 2008: Unified Communications by technology analyst Aphrodite Brinsmead, unified communications is a…well…trend to watch in 2008. If you don’t want to splurge for the entire report, give Lauren Shopp’s webstory a read-through.

Earlier today, SpinVox, which has gotten press because of the voice-to-blog service it provides to Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook, announced its entrance into the UC arena. Essentially, they’re providing a unified messaging solution, which seems like only a single part of a unified communications suite.

A SpinVox spokesperson wrote me an email: “Voice to text is the strategic heart of the next generation of UC service.”

I like believing that’s true because I work for Speech Technology magazine and I’m always looking for new topics to write about.

But in speaking with Brinsmead, she believes the next stage in UC will integrate presence and contact information with business applications (ie CRM applications). While I can definitely see voice-to-text being a component, claiming it’s “the strategic heart” seems a bit much.

Of course, all of this assumes UC will see greater uptake this year. I’ve heard that much of the hype around UC comes from Microsoft’s Unified Communications product, released late last year. If that product ends up falling flat (Why hello, Vista!), will enthusiasm die off? A December Forrester report by Henry Dewing claims that

Microsoft can win customers in the market with its UC offerings so long as it delivers reliability and scalability, demonstrates the business value of a homogeneous Microsoft-branded UC solution, and satisfies users with its unique communications devices and software UC interfaces.

So we’ll have to see how UC grows this year and what role voice ultimately plays.