Expert Q & A: VoIP is not the only way to achieve Unified Communication

In today's Unified Communication Market, vendors are scrambling to repackage their existing products with the concept of "Unified Communication" and then sell them, it is difficult for system integrators and users to understand the essence of these repackaged products. This also reflects the general development trend of the commercialization of the Unified Communication Field. How can products be commercialized without being recognized together? But in fact, this is not the first case in the history of communication technology.

The repackaging with painstaking efforts has greatly broadened the sales market. Many PBX and network vendors claim that the deployment of a VoIP system is required for Unified Communication transmission, thereby facilitating the sale of the produced VoIP devices. On the other hand, Microsoft insists that the Unified Communication that enterprises really need is an end-user collaboration tool that combines traditional PBX to achieve unified messaging and centralized management. Who is right?

Two problems are still one problem.

Of course, there is a reason for VoIP or Unified Communication in enterprises. VoIP reduces the cost of long-distance communication, simplifies the network technology, and more accurately, IT greatly simplifies the IT business process. However, many enterprises prefer Unified Communication because it can increase productivity, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction, which is equally important for enterprise operations. These two problems are related but different, but the vendors confuse them with the intention to solve all problems with solutions based on their own positions. As a result, they transfer the financial burden to the customer.

Compared with the technology such as VoIP, which completely changes the telephone transmission mode from the bottom layer, Unified Communication focuses more on the response speed of customer calls, aiming to solve customer problems and quickly respond to workflows, improve employee productivity and other issues. Therefore, the core capabilities of Unified Communication include the "status" function (employees can understand their existing status at any time), call management (reduce call back and transfer ), communication-driven business processes (ensuring seamless integration of company data, information and business processes and voice calls)

It is undeniable that for enterprise users, the main purpose of communication is to make business processes smoother and save costs. It is an important mission to closely embed communication functions into business processes. But in essence, this does not require VoIP.

Implement UC with ancillary Software

Up to now, many traditional PBX vendors have added the elements of Unified Communication to the new generation PBX model, hoping to encourage users to upgrade. The suppliers of VoIP telephone systems will bring products with more unified communication features to the high-end market. However, both methods require customers to invest in deploying a brand new PBX system to achieve unified communication. It is worth mentioning that the emergence of the idea that unified communication can be achieved based on the software form is changing the old idea that unified communication must be on the new system.

Is it necessary to maintain the original PBX system, and to provide ancillary software to achieve unified communication, or to deploy a new PBX system that can achieve unified communication? I'm afraid no customer will select the latter. This is because if an enterprise can purchase subsidiary software from ISV (independent software developer) to meet the requirements of Unified Communication, the investment in subsidiary software is negligible compared to building a new PBX system, the results are almost the same.

There has been a long history of calls for the development of unified communication products to ancillary software. But now Microsoft has put it into practice and released a Unified Communication product, represented by Office Communications Server and Exchange UM. Since then, almost all major IP communication vendors, such as beidian, Cisco, and Avaya, have formed some cooperation with Microsoft, and products can communicate with each other. More and more products can establish interfaces with traditional PBX systems to share data. Up to now, almost all major ip pbx vendors have provided standardized application programming interfaces (APIS) on open platforms to introduce third-party application developers, we hope to provide innovative applications for our customers.

The user decides the winner

The real winner is actually a user. After all, users are very realistic. If they keep the traditional telephone system while enjoying the benefits of affiliated Unified Communication software, such as productivity improvement, why not they?

On the other hand, for some customers, the implementation of VoIP may leave them away from complicated and expensive settlement of multiple communication expenditures. In fact, for these customers, an end-to-end solution including VoIP, Unified Communication, and CEBP can solve all problems. That is to say, for the various problems faced by the customer, the customer will select a solution based on different procurement standards, the problem will be solved.

In fact, since enterprises can achieve Unified Communication on traditional PBX systems with a far lower investment in deploying a new PBX system, do we still need VoIP ?! If enterprises can achieve unified communication through software in traditional PBX systems, this means that the customer will save a considerable investment, this means that manufacturers can implement VoIP and Unified Communication for customers quickly, efficiently, and at a low cost. In addition, ISVs that provide end-to-end products can provide diversified product solutions tailored to customers' specific needs. This is undoubtedly a market with unlimited potential and rapid development.

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