Hype around UC

This was a very interesting posting that I found on MarketWatch about the hype around Unified Communication. To be honest after reading the article I did not get what was the article suggesting, seemed like a few surveys being dumped in a few paragraphs.
Usage of Unified Communication and UC itself is so confusing and then the half-baked analysis presented by the analyst firms on the Internet creates more diffusion on the terms.
First, Unified Communication is a method to channelized and different streams of communications to be unified or synchronized. This implies that we could have a single channel of origination and termination of the channel of communication of somewhere in the path the different channels of communication unite.
The question one needs to ask is why would we envision doing this and what benefits, if any would be brought by this act. Some applications have demonstrated that unifying outputs and in-transit flow of information between the communication modes help make smarter choices in conclusion and reduce errors (reduce complexity and confusion in layman terms). Not to forget the aspect of latency reduction in certain aspects.
Beyond that we have not seen innovation that addresses other benefits which are not first order derivation of the error-proofing and latency reduction yet. Their certainly have been many, many big companies who have come up with acronyms and exciting phrases that get the industry intrigued (yours truly has also committed this act in the not so long ago, past). But we have not proved real benefits yet.
But hey, this is not a blog to finger-point and dog each other, but to bring the collaborative intelligence to work. Lets get busy and bring out cool stuff that is valuable.
SG