Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) is a great way for an organization to boost its internal communications through IM, presence, conferencing, collaboration and IP telephony that works just as well on the road as in the office.

But that is only part of the story. It is just as important to communicate closely with key customers and partners.

Federation is the answer, allowing outsiders to use your UC almost as intimately as employees do. Even better, top federation technologies tie disparate UC solutions together so they can work as one.

IntelePeer (News - Alert) offers federation through its Fluent Federation-as-a-Service (FaaS), which uses the cloud to deliver the integration magic. The service is particularly suited for service providers who can use it drive UC services that reach across vendors and partners.

In fact the most practical way to achieve federation is through a service provider who acts as the integration layer as they deliver up easily shared UC services.

“Today’s hosted Unified Communications (UC) world is all about being able to offer differentiated services for low incremental investment. The current method of using the legacy PSTN to provide connectivity between platforms does not provide the ability to offer differentiated services,” IntelePeer believes. “That is until now. Fluent Federation-as-a-Service (FaaS) enables service providers to connect globally and offer value-added services such as HD audio and video along with third-party applications such as call recording, hosted IVR and fraud prevention to their customers.”

With Fluent Federation, providers can offer differentiated services that cross different networks. And the services are based on intellectual property already created by IntelePeer, speeding time to market.

Learn More

On Oct. 23 at 2 p.m. EST, IntelePeer will be hosting a webinar, “UC Federation: The Next Wave of Networking," and you can register here. The webinar is aimed at enterprise technical and management staffers.

“Presence and collaboration tools are only worthwhile if they're also easy and convenient for the end-users. The value is further enhanced by increasing that convenience outside the enterprise,” IntelePeer says. “This webinar will address the question of how federation can further expand those benefits to other partners, vendors, and customers by seamlessly connecting users across different networks while maintaining strict policy-based management and security.”