Communications and IT Managed Services So Close Yet Still Far Apart

We had a great meeting yesterday with a CEO of a up and coming unified communications platform company and have some thoughts to share. I say up and coming but they are really an established company with offices in multiple countries and a solid global footprint of resellers and end-users. 

I said up and coming because this company's interest in the managed services profession is hindered not by lack of desire, competency, or relevancy, but by a deep yet narrow chasm created by decades of commingled terminology and confusion created by our own industry! I'll explain. 

Everyone knows the days of having a telephony manager and IT manager are pretty much gone now. Everything is falling underneath the umbrella of IT. And yet, the channel still has a deep divide between the communications and IT side of this industry. I'm less interested in why this has happened and more interested in solving the problem.

What can we do to begin bridging this gap between IT and communications? Frankly, I'm open to suggestions, although I do think that terminology has a large role to play. During the meeting it became apparent to me that many of the our terms were identical but had slightly different meanings; enough of a difference to cause some confusion if you weren't paying attention. Carriers, unified communications, and IT professionals all use similar managed services terminology but they don't always line up.

One easy way for us to resolve this problem is to have greater collaboration between the IT and UC (Unified Communications) communities. UC vendors don't really talk to IT MSPs and vice versa. This needs to stop. 

I'd be curious what all of you think about this.