Phone systems and PBXs are so passé. Even SMBs are talking about unified communications these days. What does that mean in practice? Companies of all sizes want to link their email, calendaring, phoning and messaging into one platform.
While enterprise has been enjoying the fruits of unified communications for a while, Gartner's telecommunications analyst Geoff Johnson says Telstra's decision to offer it as a service through its T-Suite hosted platform legitimised the marketplace for smaller companies.
Awareness of the benefits is growing and businesses are willing to have conversations that extend beyond replacing the old phone system with another. Instead of a hardware conversation, it's all about the software - and Microsoft is looking like a very strong contender.
Most flavours of unified communications are happening on premise, Johnson says. However, Telstra and Microsoft are promoting its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) as a complete set of services for about $25 a month for each seat.
"For small business they pay opex not capex, and I can turn it on or off if I get busy and hire staff or if I have a downturn and have to let people go," Johnson says.
Johnson advises resellers to look at mid-market UC solutions from Microsoft and Cisco; the latter is moving into video and email collaboration and business-grade social networking.
"Resellers need to be aware of the trends so they can position themselves against it," Johnson says.
While beyond the budget of most SMBs, it's illuminating to look at the speed with which video is coming to enterprise unified communications.
Last month Avaya launched Flare Experience, a user interface and software platform for managing various forms of communication, including instant messaging, audio-, video- or web-conferencing, and social networking.
It includes a touch-and-swipe user interface, drag-and-drop voice and video conferencing capabilities, a virtual rolodex and the ability to download various productivity and other business applications.
Avaya and Cisco have been working on several-thousand-dollar Android tablets for portable video-conferencing. However, it's not hard to imagine the same technology moving quickly to smartphones, which puts it squarely within range of the SMB.
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