ime interactive communications here, such as voice and video. In this specific case, we are not talking about in- person, face-to-face communication. We are talking about person-to-person communication through a device. And we cannot discount IM, Short Messaging Service (SMS), and other text messaging tools either. Email is an asynchronous way of communicating that makes it nonreal time. Person-to-machine communications: This is purely an interaction with a device or system. It might consist of surfing the web, dialing numbers to pull information (such as Interactive Voice Response [IVR]), checking a Twitter feed, querying the corporate inventory system, or selecting a video-on-demand program. Machine-to-machine communications: This stream of communication is the entire background processing taking place between networking devices, routers, servers, cloud computing, databases, and SO on. It might include call setup and teardown. It's made up of streaming XML SOAP for web services, tracking some remote devices through mobile networks, reading the electric meters automatically by another ma- chine, batch file transfers, and machine transactions. UC is not telephony. It's more than that. Telephony is just one component of the whole picture. UC interacts with a person or network resource anywhere on the network (the corporate network, home network, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), or the Internet). Components of UC UC is a concept that describes how multiple modes of communications can be seamless- ly integrated. UC is not a single product. It is a solution consisting of several elements, including (but not limited to) the following: Call control and multimodal communications Conferencing-audio, web, and video Collaboration tools (such as WebEx) Mobility Chapter 13: Future of Unified Communications 299 Presence Unified messaging Speech access and personal assistant Business process integration (BPI) Software to enable business process integration You can connect all these together through presence. A typ