cloud computing

When I first started using the term "unified communications" (UC), I was simply trying to expand the old domain of "unified messaging" (UM) to include initiating real-time telephone calls from a message. We had long been doing the reverse, creating voice mail messages from a failed telephone call, and I thought it was time to push the concept further by allowing recipients to easily respond to their voice messages more flexibly.

There is still quite a bit of interest in cloud services, and still no small demand for them. Due to this, there's been a rush by all manner of service providers, both old and new, to provide cloud offerings to hungry customers. Indeed, of the roughly 20,000 North American service providers, just about 20 percent of these offer cloud services at this time, and this number is expected to grow sharply over the next few years.

Over the summer I had a chance to spend some time talking about the cloud with Interactive Intelligence's Senior Solutions Marketing Manager Jason Alley. I knew Interactive Intelligence was a market leader in the contact center space and that it had dabbled in UC in the past. While many customers do use Interactive's on-premises all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), to support business users too, the company is not yet considered a major corporate telephony or UC player.

Avaya is continuing to strongly push towards cloud migration, with the first of many moves to optimize its solutions and Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) delivery processes through the Avaya Collaboration Cloud. By re-engineering and optimizing its solutions and processes, the company aims to expand the scale and reach of its cloud-based applications, thus meeting the demand from large and mid-sized enterprises.

Disruption of channels in a connected world is hardly rare. Travel agents were double-punched with online booking systems and e-tickets (eliminating the need for their specialized printers). Bookstores that survived the superstores are losing the battle to online retailers. The Internet initially offered communications VARs opportunity, but then came the squeeze from out-of-state dealers, centralized deployments, and cloud providers.

Sometimes it can seem as though everything is being offered as a service these days, but Plantronics is taking service offerings to a new level by offering PaaS; that is to say, Plantronics-as-a-Service.

Fujitsu has developed a new hosted Unified Communications solution for enterprises, with the introduction of Fujitsu Cloud Enterprise Communication Service (ECS) Connect. This is the first offering in Fujitsu's cloud-hosted, end-to-end UC solutions portfolio, and delivers voice, communications, and collaboration integration services.