{"id":5343,"date":"2007-03-30T09:31:39","date_gmt":"2007-03-30T09:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/hosted-unified-communications.html"},"modified":"2007-03-30T09:31:39","modified_gmt":"2007-03-30T09:31:39","slug":"hosted-unified-communications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/unified-communications\/hosted-unified-communications.html","title":{"rendered":"Hosted Unified Communications"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">Recently Microsoft and Nortel <a href=\"http:\/\/ipcommunications.tmcnet.com\/hot-topics\/ip-transition-enterprise\/articles\/6006-nortel-microsoft-team-unified-communications.htm\">expanded<\/a> their efforts to bring unified communications to the world. In this case, they have tackled the tough job of bringing unified communications to service providers who will in turn be able to bring UC to small and medium businesses. This collaboration makes a lot of sense as I am seeing a tremendous amount of growth and interest in the hosted communications space.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">Serving up UC backed by Nortel and Microsoft could be a relatively easy sell but there&#8217;s a chance that service providers will brand the service exclusively as their own. Having these 2 companies working with service providers will be a great benefit to the entire market. The SMB space will likely benefit most.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">It should also be pointed out that there are many companies with a number of branch offices and a hosted solution such as this fits in perfectly in such an environment. In fact a Fortune 500 company can mix and match hosted and premise-based solutions as needed to ensure they have the most advantageous solution.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">This announcement is a win for the SMB space, service providers, Microsoft and Nortel. Losers here would be some of the PBX vendors. However, it is possible that the amount of money spent on unified communications will be greater then that spent on PBX purchases today, and subsequently, even if Microsoft and Nortel carve out a larger share of the communications market for themselves, the whole pie will be much bigger than it was before.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">Of course giving service providers new technology is a fraction of the battle. The rest hinges on the ability of the service provider to actually sell new products and services. It is unknown how successful these companies will be in doing so.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">I would imagine based on recent momentum that cable companies will make the most use of hosted UC. We may also see some pure play VoIP providers get in the game.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">So as the industry gets revved up for a wave of UC solutions, it looks like they not only have CPE competition but hosted as well. Again, this is a win for the customers.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently Microsoft and Nortel expanded their efforts to bring unified communications to the world. In this case, they have tackled the tough job of bringing unified communications to service providers who will in turn be able to bring UC to small and medium businesses. This collaboration makes a lot of sense as I am seeing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,199,189,177,191],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}