ConnectSolutions Looks Ahead to Busy Year in Unified Communications

The cloud was all the buzz at ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2012 in Miami – and with good reason. There couldn’t be a hotter topic these days in the communications technology space.

To gain some insight into what providers are doing to address the growing use of cloud technologies in unified communications, I sat down with Michael Fitzpatrick, CEO of ConnectSolutions, at the show.

When I inquired as to how ConnectSolutions maintains a competitive edge in such an aggressive sector, he said, “Our purpose-built and very focused approach to developing solutions around UC has let us be very competitive and successful in driving our customers’ adoptions.”

“We have two pillars to our solutions one is our actual technology platform, UC3, purpose-built to deal with real-time communication, which is a hard and challenging problem, if you don’t have experts in that space. The second is our Orion Services, and these are a collection of adoption capabilities to not only make sure they’re successful on the initial deployment, but that they are ultimately driving adoption across the organization so they get the ROI that they expect,” continued Fitzpatrick.

And the company is seeing significant success as well. No doubt, with the building out of the cloud, there are increasing numbers of users. And ConnectSolutions has the statistics to prove it: “Last year alone we delivered over 1 billion minutes of collaboration, so our customers are seeing the value. They are adopting it and using it,” Fitzpatrick mentioned.

The company has clearly done its research, having spoken to over 20 companies in 2011 that were evaluating their unified communications strategies, Fitzpatrick mentioned. “It’s going to be a very exciting year for us,” he said.

ConnectSolutions launched its Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync solution at the show, partially in response to the results it gleaned from talking to those companies. “It was remarkable to see the traction Microsoft Lync has had,” noted Fitzpatrick.

He remarked that he sees 2012 as hopefully the promise year for unified communications, and that instead of simply talking about the proliferation of UC, that it will become a reality for organizations.

TMC’s (News - Alert) Carrie Schmelkin recently reported in a more in-depth report on the specifics of the company’s managed private cloud offering, which, she wrote, “sits between the public cloud and on-premises solution, affords large enterprises with all the benefits of the public cloud in a more feasible model for this segment.”