Voice Mobility UCN Vmerge takes on Microsoft OCS

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Voice Mobility UCN Vmerge takes on Microsoft OCS

Voice Mobility
TMC President, Rich Tehrani today excitedly writes about Voice Mobility's UCN Vmerge a product that unites various communication technologies including voice, fax, and email. The kicker is they are leveraging several Google apps to develop their unified communications platform.

Rich writes:
Thanks to Voice Mobility, you can now integrate Google Apps with your unified communications system in your campus or corporate environment. As you may know, the Google Apps suite includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Contacts, Mobile apps and other collaboration tools all using the workplace or campus domain.
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According to UCN spokesman Mike Seely, Voice Mobility's VP of Global Sales, this total solution is like deploying Microsoft Exchange server, Active Directory and Office Communication Server at a fraction of the cost. In fact, Seely compares this solution in the workplace and campus market to what Salesforce.com has done in the CRM space. I might have added that this solution is to communications as Salesforce.com is to CRM.

VmergeThe UCN Vmerge platform includes corporate instant messaging capabilities available with their LANtalk desktop and wireless application. SMS support and various text-based notification options can alert users when important messages or calls arrive. They also have ASR and TTS capabilities.

One of the cool integrations with Google is that if an email is heard via the user's mobile device (using text-to-speech), it will be shown as read in their Gmail account. Nice synchronization there...

Some of the other features include:
  • Send faxes directly from their Gmail account;
  • Receive voice and fax messages in their Gmail account;
  • Record and deposit office conversations in their Gmail account;
  • Manage live calls from their desktop;
  • Click-to-dial internal and external numbers from any Google application;
  • Synchronize call logs;
  • Import Google Contacts into UCN Vmerge for remote access;
  • Utilize least cost routing available from the enterprise PBX;
This unified communications solution puts UCN Vmerge squarely against Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. The one thing UCN Vmerge is missing though is the PBX portion. It will integrate with your existing PBX, which is nice, but I'm always skeptical as to the seamless integration - at least when it comes to integrating with legacy PBX equipment. That said, even Microsoft OCS 2007 in its current incarnation isn't a PBX replacement and has to integrate with your existing (IP-)PBX.

UCN Vmerge does support a plethora of PBX integration options, including in-band, digital set emulation, SMDI, CSTA, and SIP. That also support TAPI. Interestingly, their low-end model (50 users) runs on Windows XP, their mid-range enterprise product (10,000 users) runs on Windows 2003 Server, and their high-end (100,000 users) runs on Linux RedHat.


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