Vertical Communications: It's All about Unification

To most people, unified communications is a set of technologies that optimizes business processes and enhances human communications through automation and process streamlining. Often, the focus tends to be on the technologies involved in UC, rather than the results they can produce.

Vertical Communications takes a different stance. Although the company specializes in IP phone systems and UC solutions, its real focus is helping companies of all sizes be more confident by improving operational efficiencies, reducing costs and delighting customers.

Unification, in every sense of the word, is at the core of all this. During a video conversation at ITEXPO East 2012, Senior Product Manager Jon Young (News - Alert), stressed that Vertical offers a truly all-in-one platform.

“Many competitors offer a telephony platform, but applications like call recording or fax require adding another server or component,” Young explained. “All of this is built into our platform. It’s just a matter of licensing the application and then you have access to it.”

On first blush, Vertical’s platform might seem comparable to competitors, but because so many additional applications are built in, customers that start with telephony and branch out save a lot of money.

Vertical Communications (News - Alert), in its current form, is the consolidation of four companies. It was formerly known as Artisoft before acquiring Vertical Networks in 2005. Later that year, it also acquired Comdial and the next year brought Vodavi Technology (News - Alert) into its fold.

The company is no longer just about on-premise solutions, which were once its bread and butter. Mobility and the cloud have change all that, and Vertical has kept up. Its user interface now is available as a remote app with a drag-and-drop interface, along with instant messaging and a softphone. iOS and Android (News - Alert) applications are being developed, and will have the same capabilities as Vertical’s PC applications.

Young noted that because of its tie-in with Comdial and Vodavi, customers are able to migrate their older phones to Vertical’s platform.

No doubt, the cloud is changing business communications for the better.

“We are moving applications, where it make sense, into the cloud,” Young noted. “This allows resiliency in the network.”