Since 1991, CommuniGate Systems (News - Alert) has worked hard to create a suite of scalable, reliable, and feature-rich solutions for Internet communications based on open standards.

 

Jon R. Doyle, the company’s vice president of business development, has been a frequent contributor to TMC (News - Alert), be it through articles or through his speaking engagements at various Internet Telephony Conferences throughout the years.

 

TMCnet had a chance to catch up with Doyle and he shared his insights regarding the state of the industry, the role of a new administration in Washington, and the central role of the mobile device in the future landscape of IP communications.

 

According to Doyle, CommuniGate, which sponsors the Mobile UC community on TMCnet, had a successful 2008 and looks forward to an even more productive 2009.

 

I am looking forward to the panel on February 2, where we will discuss Hosted UC Alternatives. Right now so many vendors that are selling VoIP related technology are jumping on the UC as SaaS (News - Alert) bandwagon. We will discuss what subscribers need to be aware of when choosing their vendor. We also will give a focus on the objectives and market opportunity a SaaS provider needs to address when they are building a UC as SaaS offering for growth, such as for the SME market segment.

 

Key criteria for UC as SaaS platforms will be reliability, high density, and multi-tenancy, but also the user interface needs to be intuitive to delivery a sticky application to reduce the churn of subscribers.

 

We are very satisfied with the results of 2008. We were not only winning new partnerships with UC as SaaS providers in the Americas but also all over the world. As an example in EMEA we increased our revenues more than 100% compared to fiscal 2007. Besides the sales success we are very proud about how our products have developed with the latest version of CommuniGate Pro and the new version of our Flash-based Web 2.0 client Pronto!

 

Besides our revenue growth and product evolution I would have to think that our expansion in the global marketplace is the most exciting thing for CGS. We added new partners in the UAE, India, Australia, and set up a new effort for Eastern Europe, especially Poland, the Balkan region, and Romania. We have quickly adapted over the last 5–7 years to the global economy and one day hope we can say CommuniGate Pro is installed in every corner of the earth; we are constantly seeking out partners that know the local markets and are looking for quality products that are extremely reliable for their UC portfolio of solutions.

 

We plan to add some exciting features in 2009 to our SaaS delivery platform CommuniGate Pro that will enable providers to deliver tailored solutions to market segments within the SME sector. These solutions will focus on specific business process and will enable the SaaS provider to offer unique value.

 

We are hopeful that change in policy and new investments in the domestic economy will help boost our business and be beneficial for the global economy. We believe strongly in open standards and an open Internet and hope this new administration will help maintain this position when it comes to technology decisions.

 

Some years ago bringing voice to the IP networks was a big thing, then we saw real time communications and presence over IP — the next move will be IP Communications on the mobile device. This will be challenging for Telco operators as they re-think their offerings, and as they need to build new value added services to compensate for the potential shift towards flat rate data plans. We already see examples of this in the fixed line world of ADSL and in many places, like France or Holland you can get flat rate calling to 30+ countries. But the mobile plans and especially roaming in Europe are still massive revenue streams for the operators that have to be moved to VAS like media, content, and business applications.

 

Economics might be tough the next year but they will drive the SaaS concept with delivering flexible services and tariff models and freeing enterprises especially SMEs from CAPEX. This will be beneficial for our market approach and in comparison to the other segments of the economy we see a very good market opportunity.

 

CommuniGate Pro is the only available UC solution that is built from ground to act as a SaaS delivery UC solution. CommuniGate Pro is not a patchwork of different solutions or vendors but developed to scale to millions of users in a multi-tenancy, high-density environment — providing all UC features as flexible services but still easy to manage. The same applies for our flash-based client Pronto!, there simply is no other client, which really unifies all forms of communications from e-mail, collaboration, IM, presence, VoIP to rich media from desktop, browser to the mobile.

 

The mobile device will become the control center of all communications.