One of the tenets closely held by IT vendors is that customers proactively want to unify their communications. Everyone can theoretically see the benefit of unifying all the mediums we use today to communicate. But actually doing something about it requires overcoming everything from huge amounts of corporate inertia to finding the money to fund any network infrastructure upgrades that might be required.

The end result is that unified communications represents one of the more challenging, yet profitable, opportunities facing solution providers.  To help solution providers better address this opportunity, the Comstor unit of the distributor Westcon Group has added Cisco’s Tandberg line of video conferencing products to its stable of Cisco products.

According to Bill Corbin, Westcon executive vice president for global vendor relations, the Tandbery product line adds a set of video conferring products that have a more open systems lineage than the rest of the Cisco TelePresence lineup. This is important because open systems ease customer concerns about emerging technologies, while also providing solution providers with additional integration opportunities.

But Corbin says that when it comes to any type of unified communications offering, solutions providers would do well to remember that it will still take some time for this whole nascent product category to go main stream with customers. In the meantime, there are still plenty of profitable opportunities for solution providers that choose to make the right investments today. After all, notes Corbin, if solution providers wait until the majority of market starts buying unified communications products to jump in, that’s roughly about the same time that the law of diminishing returns will start to kick in.