What's hot in unified comms? We ask Telegate

Which UC solutions do you deploy?

Our product is a fully hosted, enterprise-grade UC PABX platform. Snom and Polycom are the main handsets we deploy to customer sites. 

When did your company first get involved in UC?

Telegate has been around a while now. We started in 2006. 

Which UC certifications and/or credentials does your company have?

I am not an engineer, but the team are extremely talented. Most have completed postgraduate studies of one form or another. One of the senior engineers actually completed a PhD at Macquarie University last year. 

Who are your main distributors for UC technologies?

As we are a hosted product, we rely on channel partners and direct sales to grow our market share. 

What cool or interesting recent UC technology have you heard of lately?

Broadly speaking, I believe integration between applications will continue to grow. APIs are now so common this opens up a lot of opportunity. Integration between CRM and telephony is where I see the next evolution. 

Can you tell us about a recent UC deployment you have done?

Telegate won a three-year contract with global publisher Wolters Kluwer CCH. Telegate is managing approximately 800 staff across Asia. 

What is driving customers’ UC projects?

UC has been around for a while now. The vendors are all offering UC as standard in products. I am not sure if it is the customers or the vendors driving the use of UC. Cloud is different. Business owners are comfortable now to put services in the cloud. The cloud PBX is the next evolution to take hardware out of the equation for IT managers. Nobody really wants the box on the wall anymore. 

UC is...?

Over time, we will see the core capabilities of unified communications move to being unified applications. Business owners need to ask themselves what benefits will my business get from moving to UC or the cloud. What development paths does that vendor have and are they in line with how my business plans to evolve.