What Is Unified Communications?

Unified communication is bridge the gap between telephone and computing to deliver the realtime messaging voice and conferencing to the desktop environment








Unified communications can help address the challenge today's organizations face as they contend with increasingly complex environments that feature a wide array of communications methods.
Employees, business partners, and customers now conduct business using seemingly infinite combinations of phones, voice messaging, e-mail, fax, mobile clients, and rich-media conferencing. Without unified communications, however, these tools are often not used as effectively as they could be. The result is information overload and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down processes, and reduce productivity.



Unified Communications Evolves



As precursors to unified communications, IP telephony and IP communications solutions have proven their ability to help solve such problems, enabling organizations to streamline business processes and reduce costs. For years, companies have realized the benefits that carrying voice, data, and video communications across a common, IP infrastructure can bring.



From these, unified communications solutions have evolved and offer even greater benefits. Unified communications applications are actually integrated within an IP network to provide structure and intelligence that can help organizations integrate their communications more closely with business processes, and ensure information reaches recipients quickly, through the most appropriate medium.
Unified communications allows businesses to collaborate in real time using advanced applications from an integrated, easy-to-use interface.





These applications include:
Video conferencing
Integrated voice and Web conferencing
Mobile IP soft phones
Voicemail, and more
Unified Communications Benefits
Unified communications solutions can save time and help control costs, while improving productivity and competitiveness:

Security

Microsoft unified communications technologies have built-in protection for your business communications to help ensure protection against spam and malicious attacks, address compliance and privacy concerns, and ensure business continuity.

Advanced spam and virus defenses

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 delivers integrated antivirus, anti-spam, and anti-phishing technologies that are automatically updated to help stop the latest threats before they impact your business and employees. This includes multiple-engine virus scanning and advanced anti-spam with Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server.

Hosted filtering services
Additional security is available through flexible off-premise protection from Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, which provides filtering service before spam and viruses can get to your infrastructure. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 also includes enhanced encryption features to help maintain the message confidentiality and instill confidence in communication.

Compliance support
New compliance capabilities help lower risk by making internal and regulatory compliance easier for the entire organization. Sophisticated transport rules, message retention, and flexible journaling capabilities allow for better enforcement of policies without disrupting employees' ability to get their work done.

Business continuity
New continuous replication capabilities continually back up data so systems can recover in minutes, even between geographically separate sites. This helps ensure that your system can stay up and running should the unexpected happen. Internet-based messages help protect the confidentiality of messages in transit.

More than 60% reported savings of three or more hours per week for each mobile worker.
Such studies confirm that migrating to a unified communications system provides a substantial return on investment (ROI) and a reduced total cost of ownership.




Millions of Iwatsu users know first-hand that we provide reliable, flexible business systems for unified communications. Here on the Unified Communications channel, you can learn more about our portfolio of North American business telecom systems available through a nationwide network of 250 authorized distributors. Here's something to get you thinking: our unified communications solutions have an out-of-box failture rate of .0007 percent. Now that's reliable!




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