Unified comms skills threat

The sheer complexity of unified communications (UC) has caused a growing skills gap in the industry, according to voice and video quality assessment specialists Psytechnics.

After conducting a survey on attitudes to UC, Psytechnics revealed that 60 per cent of UC specialists believed there was a skills shortage, and 74 per cent believed that successful UC deployments required a workforce that knew its stuff on both the underlying infrastructure and voice and video applications.

“Fundamentally UC is a complex vision that requires understanding of the underlying network capability,” remarked Psytechnics CEO Anthony Finbow.

Finbow believed that with so many vendors involved in the space, a comprehensive vision was some way off but said that things would become clearer as the pace of deployment increases and new technologies see the light of day.

EuroLAN managing consultant Keith Humphreys agreed that the biggest problem with UC rollouts was the state of the underlying network, and warned that time was running out to acquire the right skills.

“I think there’s an issue that people now in college will just assume the network is there, and want to run all sorts of applications on it,” he said.