In today’s business scenario, IT has mesmerized the workforce with increased need to communicate with one another quickly and efficiently. With SME business growing from local to regional to global, keeping employees connected to people and information has become important and a challenge too.

The buzzword floating around in the market today is “Unified Communications (UC)”.

Many SME owners step back when hearing new jargons in IT, as more and more IT penetration into the business processes has left them thinking how much more will it cost them to keep implementing and upgrading to new technologies. Well, at least not with respect to their communication needs.

Let me first take you through the journey of understanding the technology and then to the point of investment and implementation.
UC is typically defined as a communications system that includes three or more of the following elements: voice, unified messaging, video, mobility, web/data collaboration, conferencing and presence management. The basic ability to integrate voice, fax and email into a single system is the same for both large and small businesses.  There are more complexities for larger enterprises which have made significant investments in separate servers or services for fax, conferencing or email. Smaller businesses would have typically not invested in this type of separate infrastructure. However, both large and small businesses benefit from this type of integrated communication systems, and the savings will increase, as the business grows larger.

Increasing productivity is a huge benefit of a UC system – the entire communications network and its corresponding data is available at your fingertips. Software-based systems are great for increasing flexibility and scalability, because getting new features and capabilities is as easy as a software upgrade, which, in most cases, is a one-click process. But having one that supports open standards can really help make your system future-proof.

If you have support for open standards, you are not only compatible with the equipment you already have (phones, network, service providers), but you are also compatible with the equipment you don’t even know you need yet.

Smaller businesses can now benefit from enterprise-class features that were previously outside of their price range.

These products make it easy to deploy unified communications, with features like voice, video calls, fax, and chat built right into them, you can even tie in Internet searches related to your inbound phone calls.

Open source-based solutions are rapidly gaining market share for all kinds of software, including phone systems, because it is the fastest route to innovation.

Nortel with 16% of the market has the biggest piece of the pie, and Avaya has 11%, but they found that Open Source has 18% market share and Asterisk is at the core of almost 90% of those business phone systems. So, I think it is safe to say that the business telephony space is one of those areas where Open Source is set to just clobber traditional proprietary systems in the near future.

There is a lot of data inside your office about inbound and outbound callers, and both small and large businesses need this information to make smarter decisions about their business. There are a number of old proprietary systems that have been installed in large businesses that are now being replaced by futuristic UC solutions. It is incredibly powerful, and it is definitely the future – and all of that is possible with appropriate UC platform.