Unified Communication Technology promotes the telecommunications and Software Alliance

The proposal of Unified Communication adds vitality to many enterprises. By improving the Unified Communication System, enterprises can improve their work efficiency as information standards, which also promotes the development of the market economy. So what can the Unified Communication Technology do for us? Let's take a look at this in our workshop.

New business opportunities in IP Phones

Unified Communication is a new communication method that integrates real-time communication, including instant messaging, video, and application sharing, with communication means such as email, voice mail, and short message. The advantages of unified communication can be clear at a glance: convenient, efficient, cost-effective, and new business, in line with people's pursuit of communication. However, these are only some of the advantages of Unified Communication Technology.

Huang yanwen gave an example of the hotel industry. A hotel in Macao has deployed an EIP solution. The room is equipped with an EIP phone, with a large full-color touch screen and a convenient operation menu. With ease, you can view emails and get public information such as scenic spots, weather forecasts, and flights. After a business guest stays in the house, he can book a golf course, rent a car, and order a flower over an IP address. In this way, in addition to the convenience of guests, the hotel also earned the money that was not previously earned. Through cooperation with golf courses, car dealers, flower shops, and other service agencies, the hotel has become an intermediary and revenue share has been realized through the consumption of guests. This is a new business opportunity and a new business model for hotel service customers.

Not only the hotel industry, said Huang yanwen. For other industries, the new Unified Communication Technology System can also bring new business opportunities. He believes that unified communication can derive new business models that can truly bring visible value to users. This is an important reason why Unified Communication is widely accepted by the industry.

From Integration to unified market maturity

Prior to Unified Communication, many vendors, including beidian, were talking about integration, network architecture integration, and application platform integration. What is the difference between integration and unification?

Huang yanwen believes that unification can be said to be the sublimation of integration, but it is actually a step-by-step development process. If there is a difference, it is the business model. In the past, integration was more about the integration of architecture and application systems. In Unified Communication, a system and a terminal can change the application model and bring new commercial value.

Unified Communication cannot be achieved overnight. In the past "integration" phase, through a large amount of publicity and market expansion, users have been able to accept integrated communication, this laid a good foundation for today's Unified Communication. From this perspective, the market has gradually matured through the efforts of the past few years. Of the PBX switches sold by beidian last year, 50% of terminals mounted IP Phones according to user requirements. At the same time, the technology for transmitting voice over an IP network is constantly improving. All these allow users who have long understood that IP phones are convenient and cost-effective, and do not worry about voice quality as they used to, so that they can start to use IP Phones safely.

Key Step: China Telecom and Software Alliance

The true maturity of Unified Communication requires the alliance of telecommunications and software. Unified Communication technology not only requires the integration of communication platforms, but also the integration of different terminals and application software. This is the key to moving Unified Communication to users. As Dr. Zhang HONGJIANG, president of Microsoft's Asian Engineering Institute and vice president of Microsoft's China R & D group, said: "Today, the communication industry has passed the traditional telephone age and ushered in a new IP era. The integration of telecommunications and networks breaks the boundaries of software in the past. New multimedia applications require support from new application software. At present, in the new application network, the roles of underlying suppliers and application providers are being separated. It is the application and service requirements that give Microsoft the opportunity to enter the communication field ."

In fact, from the perspective of communication development, communication in the future will be an era in which software and services play a major role. That's why, in last July, the alliance that Beijing Telecom and Microsoft jointly promoted Unified Communication became even more significant. One Party has accumulated many years of experience in the integrated VoIP architecture, and the other party is the leader in desktop system software. This alliance allows both parties to make rapid progress in Unified Communication, and unified communication is also rapidly mature, and attracted the attention of users. Within half a year after the establishment of the Alliance, the two companies signed agreements with a number of customers around the world and explored hundreds of potential customers who wanted to benefit from Unified Communication.

At present, the innovative communication alliance established by Microsoft and beidian is helping companies speed up the transition to voice IP (VoIP) and Unified Communication, thus realizing the successful transformation of enterprise communication. Microsoft and beidian have released three new solutions: Unified Communication Integration System-combining beidian and Microsoft technologies in a single hardware environment, provides efficient, high-quality, and easy-to-deploy VoIP and unified communication services in remote office locations; Unified Messaging-simplifies customer network deployment, the local session Initial Protocol (SIP) interconnectivity between beidian Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is improved, and both parties plan to launch a unified messaging solution; conference-expanded the rich features of beidian Multimedia conference to Microsoft Office Communication System 2007, enabling customers to use voice, real-time messaging, audio/video conferencing, and other applications, get a consistent and familiar experience.

At present, the cooperation between Nortel and Microsoft is moving forward. On June 23, January this year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO and President Mike Zafirovski jointly announced a joint plan to achieve unified communication, in order to break the barriers between voice, email, instant messaging, multimedia conferencing and other forms of communication, and thus greatly improve the efficiency of enterprise communication.

Beidian also cooperates with IBM to embed multimedia communication solutions into IBM Lotus Notes, so as to provide unified communication technology functions for millions of Lotus Notes users around the world, allows users to send or receive calls directly from the call records of Lotus Notes emails or existing Lotus Notes address book, without the need to search for numbers.