Unified Communications holds enormous promise as a coherent, integrated approach to incorporating the full spectrum of business communications modalities, and as direct path to cut through “communications clutter” resulting in accelerated time-to-action. It also offers a cost-effective way to more directly connect the company to its customers, employees to employees, and more tightly bind business partners and suppliers. Reducing human latency is a key benefit of UC, resulting in measurably increased efficiency and improved customer intimacy.

Five months of hype have roiled the waters for Google Wave. Is it an Outlook killer? The search giant’s idea of a social network? One unified communications tool to rule us all? The buzz began at May’s Google I/O Developer conference. Now, after much talk in the tech blogosphere and among analysts, Wave is finally in preview mode. Some lucky invitees — yours truly included — were asked to join the testing phase by those who are either developers, key Google Apps business customers or those who were speedy enough to be among the first to volunteer.