Unified Office

Ray Pasquale gives an overview of Unified Office, a next gen-managed service provider aimed at providing premise and cloud solutions for SMBs.

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant and I'm at IT Expo in Miami. I'm with Ray Pasquale who is the CEO of Unified Office. He's going to tell us about what Unified Office is and its value proposition. Good morning, Ray.

Ray Pasquale: How are you?

Blair: Good. What's Unified Office?

Ray: We're a next-generation managed service provider. We combine the best in class of voice communications with IT services into a seamless, easy-to-use service for small business. We take care of the problem of too many devices - lots of mobile devices these days. I believe the desktop phone is going to be a thing of the past in a couple of years. So a new service provider needs to come into being to handle the complexity of creating voice communications on both devices, and that's what we try to do.

We integrate our service throughout iPads, Android tablets - any device you want to bring to work, we're going to make sure that our service works on that flawlessly - and then we back that up with a 24/7 managed network model. So, we're always watching over your service as well. Sometimes you might be sleeping and we're finding issues in your network and we're fixing them quietly for you.

Blair: What kinds of features and capabilities are part of the service that you provide?

Ray: We do video calling right now. We do extension dialing across all devices creating the ultimate virtual office, if you will. So, we actually have HTML5 apps that we're rolling out for a virtual receptionist - an operator panel - so that your office manager could be home with the kids one day and still manage the voice communications by rolling out her tablet and answering telephones and transferring them and doing all those cool things that you formerly had to do by sitting in an office in front of a big, giant phone.

I think that's the world we're going to live in and I think the challenge for small business is how do they adapt to all of this rapid innovation? They're not going to get it from the big carriers. It's too hard for them to deliver that kind of innovation. So the opportunity for Unified Office is to be just that for them.

Blair: Are you a premise provider or a cloud provider?

Ray: We're hybrid. We're agnostic. We do cloud when we have to and premise where we have to and we do both at the same time. We spend time with our customers on the front end and we engage in an engineering design exercise with them. So, I guess the answer is we're both.

Blair: Does the customer have something on their premise or how does this work?

Ray: Yes. We put a small box. Our entry level box will support up to about 100 users using standard over subscription of 10 to one - if that makes any sense. Let's put it this way: it'll do 40 simultaneous calls. That's a lot of people on the phone in a small office all the time. That box that's on the premise runs our software. It's our kind of view into the world where we also monitor the quality of your broadband and the quality of your network.

Then, as you're roaming about the world like we are this week, it's also engineered to allow us to be mobile and use our tablets to communicate back and forth.

Blair: You said you provide audio conferencing, video conferencing, voicemail to email.

Ray: We do. We have an e-fax service that we're working on and we're also in the early stages of integrating WebRTC underwire service as well. We want to absorb the complexity for the small business person and give them a really, really good experience with their communications. Business operates in real time today.

Blair: What will WebRTC provide for you?

Ray: It'll allow us to be more integrative in terms of the communications through web apps that we deploy. Currently, if you make a phone call, let's say you're trying to answer a phone on behalf of somebody else, a sub client has to power itself up first and then you push the button to answer. In that application, WebRTC is going to be fully integrated. A voice communications API will be built into the browser so you won't have to power up that second app. It'll happen just from the browser.

Blair: You mentioned that you use channel partners. So, for channel partners that are interested in working with you, what should they be thinking about?

Ray: They should be thinking about contacting the Unified Office very soon.

Blair: Okay. Thank you very much.

Ray: Thanks.