Need for collaboration will drive apps into the cloud, says Verizon

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 05 May 2010 09:53

Business IT - Networking

The need to integrate mainstream enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM with unified communications services and make them accessible from any device, anywhere will drive all these applications into the cloud over the next few years, according to Verizon Business' UC practice manager, Ben Green.

Green says that the 'unified communications as a service' (UCaaS) platform of the future will provide a full suite of communications services, such as hosted IP telephony, voicemail, email, instant messaging and presence, but more importantly will interface readily to other applications such as ERP and CRM, virtualised and running in the cloud.

He sees this integration as "the next revolution" in unified communications services but predicts that is will likely be around 2015 before the first large scale adoptions take place.

"Those business applications will need standard hooks into the UC systems, and a lot of companies are starting to offer them'¦These will start to become mainstream in about two years and in two to five years the interoperability issues will go away," he predicts.

Widespread availability of SIP trunking will also be key to delivering this functionality from the cloud and Green said that Verizon Business will have this available throughout most of Asia Pacific.

"We are moving to introduce SIP trunking and some news will come out in the next few weeks on our SIP trunking roadmap for Asia Pacific. That will start to differentiate us in the marketplace and will be one of the building blocks towards our UCaaS platform," Green said.

The company will offer SIP trunking to Australian customers later this year. It has already offered BroadSoft based IP telephony in Australia for several years. "It's probably our most mature markets," Green said. "It is a fully outsourced model where we support customers down the desktop including desktop integration, click to dial etc."

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