TMCnet's Unified Communications Week in Review

There is a great deal of news in the Unified Communications (News - Alert) arena this week.

CounterPath Corporation has entered into an agreement with Rogers Communications (News - Alert) to allow Canadians to use their wireless numbers to enable single-number reachability by talk and text. Eligible wireless customers can now create and manage contact lists that are automatically synched between their computer and mobile phone with Rogers One Number.

“Service providers worldwide know that their customers want a convenient, cost-effective way to stay in touch across multiple devices and networks, leveraging a single phone number,” said Donovan Jones, president and CEO, CounterPath (News - Alert) in a company press release. “As Canada's largest wireless provider, Rogers continues to demonstrate innovation by delivering the kind of single-number voice, video and messaging reachability that consumers want.”

In other news, according to an In-Stat (News - Alert) study called “The Business of Tablets: Tablet Usage in U.S. Business,” more people are bringing their tablets into the workplace. Email is the most common function for tablets, while note-taking is the second most popular use. Only 22 percent of users had tablets that were paid for by their companies, and people who used 3G tablets tended to travel often.

“Email is by far the most dominant tablet application for business users,” said Frank Dickson, VP of Mobile Research. “However, when you dig into the data, you find a plethora of strong niche uses arising. In addition to email, customer relationship management and IT network intelligence [functions] are listed as ‘most important’ uses.”

Finally, customer contact solutions vendor Aspect has inked a partnership deal with 2e2, an ICT lifecycle services provider, to offer enterprises solutions that combine Aspect's unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) applications and 2e2’s project management, technology, and support services.

The partnership will give 2e2 full access to Aspect's portfolio of UC solutions, which come integrated with Microsoft's (News - Alert) leading software suites including Exchange, Lync, and Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  Aspect's Unified IP customer contact and workforce optimization platform is designed to create a unified contact center solution to bring together inbound, outbound, voice portal, Internet contact, multi-channel self-service and proactive contact capabilities.