Hosted UC for SMBs Gets

Call it "hosted" or "SaaS" (Software as a Service), non-premise-based unified communications has always had some economic advantages for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs). Generally, the smaller the organization, the more sense it makes for a hosted service. Arguments for and against it can sometimes be amusing. A service provider will say, "Our service is great, you only pay ‘per seat' as you need it." Premise-based appliance folks will counter with, "Our system doesn't need IT staff but has room to grow and serves a bunch of users for one price. With services, every time you add a user, you've got to pay more!"

As I've always said, the ultimate deciding factor whether or not to use services has been corporate culture - can data and communications be held outside of the corporate ‘boundary'? Of course, in an age when workers are going mobile, the ‘boundary' is around each device, not a brick-and-mortar facility.

You'll notice in this issue that we gave a Product of the Year award to a company that is successfully competing with the big boys in terms of UC services - PanTerra Networks (www.panterranetworks.com), an expert in on-demand UC that services SMBs with its WorldSmart (WS-Suite).

As is the case with on-demand, services-based UC, the kind of capex you'd normally spend to get up and running is eliminated. WorldSmart services run not on your premises but in a safe, high availability, cloud-based datacenter and are delivered to your business on-demand through your existing data network. With WorldSmart, you not only get all of the expected PBX voice services, but also the communications and collaboration services you already use, such as good old email, a company-wide calendar and contacts, audio conferencing, web collaboration, desktop share, an inbound call center, secure IM and SMS Messaging, as well as Unified Presence and mobility, all with a presence-based intelligent message routing capability among multiple messaging systems. PanTerra claims you can save over 75 percent in monthly expenses using their service over separately priced service offerings.

PanTerra offers a friendly easy-to-provision and easy-to-use/administer interface, and it can tightly integrate with business apps such as Salesforce. (WorldSmart, by the way, is co-branded and re-sold exclusively through service providers, distributors and resellers.)

And speaking of the "big boys", Verizon now offers a new UC service, this one aimed at enterprise customers
and based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It too gives you desktop access to voice, email, SMS and web conferencing services. You can make voice calls to fellow staffers via both PCs and conventional station sets, and enhanced presence status functionality gives you real-time information on your colleagues' status, location and availability. The voice component fully integrates with any Microsoft-certified PBX or SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) connection and enables yout to make a call from your computer whenever an Internet connection is available.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC's IP Communications Group.