A food services company that integrated click-to-call into its ERP program. A bank centralizing call centers from 94 to one. A hospital whose nurses carry wireless phones that run location-based applications. Abducted child alerts being automatically text messaged to cell phones. None of those sounds like unified communications to me, yet Cisco Systems cited every single one of them at it's annual analyst conference yesterday.

In fact, Cisco seems to put all IP communications under the unified communications moniker. During a session on the topic, Rick Moran, Cisco's VP of product and technology marketing for IP communications said there was potentially a $34 billion market in unified communications, but the slide he showed representing market potential included things like IP PBXes.

Unless I've been wrong for a year, the definition – the one we've been using in the magazine, as well as how analysts and consultants describe it to me – is that unified communications is an application (and the supporting hardware) that combines voice, video, instant messaging and often some sort of conferencing into a presence-enabled, integrated user interface. And for the vision of ceaseless collaboration to actually follow through, this capability needs to be combined with click-to-call in workflow processes and interoperable with other communication tools.

Cisco's muddying the waters a bit by describing all IP communications as unified communications. They’re not. At its base, VoIP is still a phone with the potential to tie in applications, chat is chat, videoconferencing is videoconferencing, presence is presence. It takes all those elements tied together to make unified communications happen. Not that Cisco doesn't have a vision for that. It does, but should focus on marketing that vision as unified communications instead of calling every IP communication "unified."

I can't blame them entirely. After all, who's against something that's unified, and other companies are doing the same thing. It's just that there are better ways to go if you're really serious about developing new technology instead of rebranding the old.