SMEs bel ieve unified communications (UC) to be hard to use and harder to implement. Gartner puts it in the middle of the hype curve, and says it won’t be ready for another year or two. AMI Partners says few SMEs are implementing it, and no vendor has a complete SME or enterprise offering.

But that was last year. Today the Siemens HiPath OpenOffice gives SMEs an easy-to-configure and –use, complete, cost-effective UC platform. If the market accepts it, and there seems to be little chance of it not doing so, this would accelerate Gartner’s hype cycle by at least a year. So it might be time to break out the old Magic Quadrant of early leaders earlier rather than later.