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Unified Communications Week in Review: Masergy, Mitel, Vodafone

By David Delony
Contributing Writer

It’s the end of another week, and time to take a look at some of the top unified communications news.

Video conferencing has finally become a mainstream business technology thanks largely in part to UC, but troubleshooting video quality issues can be tricky. Masergy has announced that it released some analytics to help administrators diagnose and fix problems with video with its Intelligent Service Control (ISC) application.

Mitel got some good news from the research firm Gartner (News - Alert) this week. Mitel landed in Gartner’s Visionaries Quadrant for its Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform. The company has become the most popular provider in both the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and North America.

Vodafone also unveiled its own cloud-based UC service in the U.K. this week, dubbed One Net. One Net provides collaboration tools based on Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync and Exchange in addition to voice and video communication. Vodafone is offering three tiers: One Net Express, One Net Business and One Net Enterprise, all of them geared toward different business types.

One of the major advantages of UC is that it’s finally made video conferencing accessible to ordinary businesses, including small and medium businesses. In the past, video conferencing was the domain of expensive proprietary systems and only executives at major corporations used them. With the growth of the Internet, high-quality video conferencing solutions are part of everyday business use, whether on the desktop or mobile devices

“There are now solutions available that enable SMBs to have the same high quality video capabilities as larger organizations. The necessity is that in the globally connected world where even SMBs are seeking customers everywhere, all businesses regardless of size need to have a state-of-the-art look and feel.” TMCnet senior editor Peter Bernstein wrote.

TMCnet will also be hosting a webinar on the subject with Dave Crilley, vice president of marketing of Tely Labs,entitled “Essential Tools for the 21st Century Conference Room.”

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