CommuniGate: ITEXPO Highlighted Need for Complete Mobile UC Delivered Using SaaS

At ITEXPO West 2008 last week, thousands of attendees flocked to Los Angeles for the year’s biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year. Vendors, speakers and attendees at the show all had opportunities to network and share their insights on industry trends.

 

One of the speakers at ITEXPO, Jon Doyle (News - Alert) from CommuniGate Systems, focused on the intersection between software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified communications (UC). In following up with reflections on the show (see Q&A below), Doyle said that UC offered via the SaaS (News - Alert) model results in reliable, feature rich solutions that deliver increased average revenue per user (ARPU).

 

JD: Besides the general networking the main reason for us is to get an overview on how the vendor market is presenting its solutions to customers. In some shows we see a quite big gap of what the vendors are presenting and what the market and the customer are looking for. ITEXPO gave a perfect scenario, especially with the panel discussions on business cases, to be part of the discussions between vendors and customers.  

 

JD: Our message is mainly targeted toward Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers and  telcos. Since CommuniGate Systems (News - Alert) is offering a platform for UC as SaaS we wanted to convey the most important objectives to address when building a UC platform for SMB: reliability, densitiy and multi-tenancy as well as feature-rich sets of applications for ARPU increase.

 

JD: I was a speaker in the panel discussion, “A Business Case for UC,” and found it quite interesting how many PBX (News - Alert) vendors claim to deliver UC while they are selling telephony and not an integrated solution unifying all forms of data and voice communications. The whole concept of UC is a technology that is integrated and leverage such information as presence services to make decision on how applications function, route calls, or initiate actions for the user. But UC is often used these days as a buzzword which is confusing the customers who look for UC and see mere switches or PBXs with a UC badge on them.

 

 

JD: The market is growing especially with service providers looking for sticky applications to reduce churn rates and keep their customers on their network. They all are looking for value-added services (VAS) and some SaaS offering to increase the overall ARPU. The fastest growing market to us is UC as SaaS to SMBs, as this segment shows more customer loyalty and has been under served for a long period. It is now time to bring SMBs to cutting edge technology in a flexible SaaS model.

 

JD: CommuniGate Pro truly unifies all forms of UC — including e-mail, calendaring, presence, IM, voice and rich media — into a single identity and on a single server software, one product to install, one product to maintain. CommuniGate Pro is platform-agnostic and runs on Mac OS X as well as on Linux, Windows or Sun Solaris. When you look at the big names like Cisco or Microsoft (News - Alert), they put together different parts developed by them or by third party — so it is a UC package but seldom an integrated UC solution.

 

Companies like Cisco and MS target the enterprise space, while CommuniGate Pro serves two distinct markets that have the same type of end user. First, CommuniGate Pro is a high density UC platform for Network Operators delivering UC in the SaaS model targeting the SMB sector. CommuniGate Pro is built for multi-tenancy from the ground. Second, since CommuniGate Pro is a complete UC solution that can scale down to one server, the product is also ideal for SMBs wanting to run the server on-premises, and not hosted.

 

JD: It was good to see how the market presents itself and get direct response from the market on our positioning and offerings which proofed to be the right one hitting the spot what attendees are looking for when it comes to mobile UC.