As technology evolves, there is always a never-ending question to designers and implementers: "What is coming next?" The answer is "Collaboration." Telephony collaboration is enabling and expanding productivity of organizations by integrating existing productivity tools like contact centers, Web portals, CRM, and ERM with all the benefits of VoIP and Unified Communications. Various organizations such as Datamonitor, Gartner, IDC, InStat, Synergy, and Wainhouse have estimated the industry sales forecasts of telephony at 12 billion US dollars, Unified Communications at 27 billion, with collaboration upward of 34 billion dollars total addressable market!

The move to collaboration is strengthened by the actions of both Cisco and Microsoft, as they have each unveiled several collaborative technologies and the means to integrate them utilizing Web 2.0 programming.