I recently had the opportunity to ask John Doyle, vice president of Business Development at CommuniGate Systems (News - Alert) about Unified Communications, delivery of UC in the SaaS model and how the market looks to be taking shape.

CommuniGate Systems' goal is to consolidate all forms of Internet Communications into one address space, making the single address for email, IM, VoIP and video calling, more productive, portable, and independent of tariffs and tolls of closed network topologies.

What has been your company's biggest achievement in 2008 so far?

 

Delivery of our Flash based Unified Communications client Pronto! version 2.2. This release was significant because we added a lot of sharing capabilities and video mail, hot applications for social networking and collaboration. You can take Pronto! for a spin by grabbing a free account here www.TalktoIP.com

 

What can we expect to see for from your company for the next 12 months?

 

We are constantly adding new features to our Unified Communications platform to make it the most complete and reliable solution for providers delivering UC in the SaaS model. Some of the most exciting features coming include video, powerful mashups for corporate portals, and delivery of UC to the mobile handset. We see users spending less and less time at the desktop and hard phone, becoming more mobile. The usage model on the mobile side is quite powerful, as users can become a virtualized extension of the office taking the "hot desking" concept to the phone in your pocket, or any computer you log onto.

How do you see the communications market evolving?

 

We see Unified Communications becoming much more pervasive in the next 5 years as vendors mature and the solutions become more turn key. We also see the delivery of UC in the SaaS model growing rapidly, especially in the SME sector.

 

What company made the biggest contribution to communications this year?

 

For us one of the major contributions was several technologies from Adobe that boosted our capabilities in our client technology Pronto! that is based on Flash. We were pleased to see Adobe AIR released so we could port Pronto! to the desktop, Adobe Flex3 gave us significant performance boosts, and the Flash 9 player allows us to deliver VOD/IPTV (Video on Demand / IP Television) in HD quality and HD sound. 

 

 

Certainly Google has helped the market become more innovative by pushing companies and network operators to compete with applications and quality against advertising funded applications. We also see Google paving the way for the acceptance of solutions delivered in the SaaS model.

 

 

Apple did two major things this year, first they have succeeded in getting a significant market share of the laptop market, fueling pent up frustrations with MS Vista and "lock into Microsoft in general". Apple is shaking the market up, and it is not just graphics shops, enterprises from all sectors are accepting new ideas and different ways, and they are turning to Apple more than ever. Apple also did a phenomenal thing for mobility with the iPhone (News - Alert). They have actually shipped an "Internet Device" more than a phone. Usage of the internet on the iPhone is 10x what it was for any legacy phone and WAP pages Data usage on the iPhone is also redesigning the industry as we know it, users will access business applications and web technology on mobile devices as never before.  

 

 

I was a Sony Ericsson (News - Alert) user for years and moved to the iPhone.

 

 

The iPhone 3G will certainly surpass the RIM in 2009 and change the market around "Internet Access" in powerful ways just like the Blackberry changed how we worked by providing easy to access mobile email.

 

  What do you think the communications market might look like in five years?

 

In five years we will start to see the real fruits of the Semantic or Web 3.0 technologies. Powerful mashups of applications working with our communications tools will drive productivity that can only be imagined today. How many people could have predicted what email would do to the market in 1996, or what IM would do, or what social networking is doing? I think we will see some amazing technologies as the data on the web starts to work for the applications and not just smart search engine results, but predictable calculations based on various inputs of data and presence information about ourselves.

 

 

We hope that we will be able to demonstrate what UC really looks like, and how it works. Many PBX (News - Alert) vendors smoke screen the market talking about UC when they are really providing IP telephony. We also want to really focus in on quality and reliable technology decisions a person has to evaluate as they contemplate trusting often times their entire company communications to new technologies and how that can enhance operations.

 

What type of attendees do you think should come to your session?

 

Product managers or marketing managers from Network Operators of all sizes and of course IT decision makers from Enterprises.

Why should customers choose your company's solutions?

 

We like to say our solutions are different in one major aspect, reliability. It is a feature we develop in our technology first, while many solutions never have this feature at all. CommuniGate Pro is known for its reliability since a decade, powering up to 50 million email users at ease. With Unified Communications reliability becomes even more important. People might accept some hours of downtime for e-mail as it is a kind of free service – but certainly cannot accept phone calls that get dropped, wrong presence information, failure of any Value Added Service they pay for – especially when all communication is unified and should be accessible from desk to mobile, anywhere.

 

 

Apple will start to take more Enterprise market share on the server side applications in the Enterprise market.