MWC: Making Unified Communications More Universal

While smartphones have gotten quite good at handling email, scheduling and chat, in some ways the core real time communications functionality of the smartphone are still relative silos tied to devices themselves. Things like voice, video and collaboration are still relatively separate elements.

Unified communications is making strides to change that, however. Businesses are needing more integrated solutions that make communication something that just happens, not something to be managed. This has leading to a breaking down of those silos.

Providers such as GENBAND (News - Alert) now make it possible make and receive calls, host video conferences and collaborate on the web in real time from a standard WebRTC browser.

It now also is possible to integrate a company’s telephone line straight into Google (News - Alert) Apps, making it possible to place and receive calls from within Gmail, keeping these calls in sync with emails from the caller, documents on Google Drive and chat sessions via Google Hangouts.

Having a single visual voicemail system that is integrated both in the office and on mobile phones also now is a reality, as GENBAND plans to show off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

Some of the other developments on display at Mobile World Congress include using Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync for presence, chat and directory services, but keeping critical real time communications such as voice and video—services that cannot afford latency—on a firm’s carrier-grade IP multimedia core.

Bringing together the real time communications components and making them fully integrated and available on any device at any time is the ultimate promise of unified communications, after all. WebRTC is a powerful tool to make this a reality, as it transcends a particular platform and lets businesses put together the right technology solutions on the backend but offer it to employees via any browser that can support WebRTC.