Unified Communications Featured Article

Unified Communications Week in Review

By David Delony
Contributing Writer

It’s the end of another week, and time to take a look at some of the top stories we’ve been following in the world of unified communications.

One of the rising stars in the world of UC is Unified Office, which focuses on cloud-based managed solutions and unified communications services. The company received some new capital from a couple of Boston venture capitalists, Bill McCullen and Rick Burnes.

“We are honored to have Rick Burnes and LaunchCapital onboard as our most recent investors,”   Unified Office CEO and founder Ray Pasquale said. “Their successes here in New England and across the country speak for themselves. They, along with other key investors and our board of directors together comprise a Who's Who of the high tech industry on the East Coast. We are entering a significant growth phase for our services and view Rick and Bill's involvement as a strong testament to the bright future of our company.”

If you were at TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO in Las Vegas last week, you probably would have seen a lot of UC solutions. Vendors can’t deliver them fast enough and companies can’t install them fast enough. Peter Bernstein, senior editor of Unified Communications (News - Alert), wrote in a piece this week that the time to implement UC systems is now. Implementing unified communications is not just about adding legacy phone systems to VoIP and text chats, but adding new features such as presence and support for mobile devices that are becoming indispensable to modern business communications.

In fact, the wide adoption of mobile devices is one of the factors currently driving the UC boom, according to a report by Grand View Research. The market is expected to reach $75.81 by 2020. A lot of that comes from the increasing adoption of mobile devices, including BYOD policies. Supporting mobile workforces is a major reason for adoption UC systems, especially hosted systems.

Finally, Thinking Phone (News - Alert) Networks, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) provider, has acquired managed UC provider Whaleback Managed Services. Whaleback reassured users that their service would not be interrupted but that they would gain new features such as mobile services and integrated text messaging.

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