UC delivered by SaaS White Papers

CommuniGate Systems (www.communigate.com), the leader of feature-rich Value Added Services for Unified Communications, recently commissioned some fascinating white papers. One white paper was done with the The Radicati Group (www.radicati.com), and another with Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com). These papers reveal all sorts of interesting information regarding unified communications (UC) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

The Radicati white paper examines how service providers can best leverage the emerging market opportunity for UC delivered as SaaS, in the process indicating that service providers should be cautious when they contemplate building up a UC platform to serve their customers. Entitled, Unified Communications as a Software as a Service (SaaS) Opportunity, the paper starts off by noting that UC presents an exciting new business opportunity for service providers targeting the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) market, a higher revenue opportunity than consumers thanks to its propensity for premium, value-added features and stronger customer loyalty.

Although delivering UC as SaaS is an attractive position for service providers, choosing the proper UC platform makes the difference between success and failure. White label solutions (such as Google Apps, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo) represent a quick way for providers to offer a UC service, but the downsides include a loss of subscriber account information to the white label provider, a lack of control over the quality of the service, and the fact that most of these vendors offer their own competing SaaS solutions such as MS Live and Google Apps.

Service providers wanting instead to develop their own UC services are encouraged to keep certain things in mind, such as choosing a high-density platform that can scale up easily and choosing a multi-tenancy solution that can virtualize individual hosted enterprises while providing a single system image to ensure management of systems that could have thousands of virtualized instances running. The paper also admonishes providers to make sure that their UC platform supports mobile users and that updates can be done while the service or system is "hot". The platform should support integration with existing billing and provisioning systems, offer a fast go-tomarket time, be "future-ready", and should use Web 2.0 client techniques for delivery of services which enable mobility for today's mobile workforce.

The paper then discusses CommuniGate Systems' own comprehensive UC hosting platform, CommuniGate Pro, which includes messaging, calendaring, mobility, IM, presence services, Rich Media Delivery, and VoIP. CommuniGate Pro provides feature-rich messaging and collaboration, directory services, address book management, mailing lists, administrative management, and more. The platform supports multiple operating systems as well as synchronization with MAPI and POP3/IMAP4 clients to share calendars, contacts, and folders. The VoIP suite ships with a virtualized IP PBX that's fully scalable for multi-tenant hosting, allowing businesses to streamline all their communications into CommuniGate Pro.

Frost & Sullivan's white paper, CommuniGate Pro's Mobile Unified Communications Monetizing UC for an Enterprise SaaS Value Added Service by Ronald Gruia, explains that third party developers desire an application development environment enabling them to design a "universal UC client" that can be leveraged for hundreds of web-based services. One of the best platforms in this area is Adobe's Macromedia Flash-based Adobe^® Flex^™ 3, since it allows programmers to create Internet apps that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems, and it has even been bundled with offerings from the top five mobile handset vendors.

As it happens, CommuniGate Systems has used Adobe's Flash^®, Flex 3 and AIR technologies to develop Pronto!, a powerful, extensible, yet lean Flash-based UC client capable of delivering a suite of applications ranging from "click-tocall" call control, email and IM to Rich Media, groupware and VoIP. Pronto! scales to support both consumer and enterprise subscribers, with virtual domains on the multitenant UC platform (CommuniGate Pro) which makes it appealing to carriers wanting to offer UC via the SaaS model. The Pronto! framework allows for new application "modules" to be inserted which run inside Pronto! Or the module can access external applications and services and simply present the data back to the user interface.

Pronto! also works in real-time with the Mobile access features of CommuniGate Pro such as AirSync (for the messaging, calendar, and PIM component) and CommuniGate Mobi- Connect Mobile PBX services, CommuniGate Pro's Mobile Unified Communications technology that brings all the PBX features and "dial-tone" to the mobile handset. Interestingly, the CommuniGate MobiConnect app can link the iPhone 3G to the CommuniGate Pro PBX services.

The Frost & Sullivan paper also notes that, by remaining committed to the development of additional Pronto! features, CommuniGate Systems will probably capture the necessary mindshare to be a top-echelon player in the UC SaaS market. Yours Truly has followed CommuniGate since their founding and has always been impressed with their ability to "turn on dime" in the face of changing technologies. They will undoubtedly master the UC SaaS market with their usual aplomb.

The whitepapers can be downloaded at www.communigate.com/carrier/reviews.html