Good communications are key to any company's success. The most successful enterprises strive for anywhere, anytime communications to best serve employees and clients who are increasingly mobile and geographically diverse. By unifying communications, a company can deliver communications anywhere, anytime and any way.

To achieve unity, enterprises typically integrate new communications solutions into their existing infrastructures. Yet many legacy systems offer no clear roadmap for integration. In the absence of an integration path, companies must be selective when choosing a vendor.

Organizations should evaluate vendors on a number of criteria, including their ability to:

• Minimize disruption by leveraging existing infrastructure and user experience.
• Help determine the business, technical and product considerations to identify the best solution.
• Offer the greatest depth and breadth of integration options that include all communications that can be unified: telephony, messaging, mobility, presence and conferencing.
• Address integration with a variety of business processes and applications that include collaboration tools, social networking, mashups and general business processes.
• Provide a full complement of features so those of critical importance can be easily deployed.

Avaya and IBM understand that the best communications solutions meet all of these criteria. That is why they have leveraged their considerable technologies, platforms and roadmaps to develop a powerful unified communications solution for the enterprise.