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What is Unified Communications? | WhichVoIP

What is Unified Communications?

The state of modern communications has advanced rapidly over the past two decades, to incorporate tools and mechanisms that would never have been dreamt of by the early innovators in the 19th century. The next such innovation is going to be unified communications. The concept is elegantly simple; it merely unifies all forms of electronic communications into a single interface. In other words, through the unified communications umbrella, one would be able to initiate and receive phone calls, emails, chats, faxes, and other types of communication, without having to launch separate programs on separate devices. Another major goal of unified communications is greater mobility—that is, to allow any type of communications to take place from a variety of devices, from any location.

In a simple example of unified communications, it would be possible for example for phone calls, faxes, and emails to follow the owner from place to place, and device to device. Phone calls from multiple numbers for example, would be routed to the person's smartphone while on the road. Emails would be able to be retrieved and listened to through a simulated voice, over the phone.

Business VoIP - The driver of Unified Communications

The prospect of unified communications has been made possible primarily through Voice over IP (VoIP), which allows for a much greater level of integration than was possible with standard copper-wire, circuit-switched telephony.

For business, a great advantage of unified communications is simplicity and enhanced communications. Already, several major vendors have rolled out first generation unified communications products, and to some degree, this level of unification has been incorporated into standard VoIP offerings. For example, while ordinary VoIP offerings are by no means full-fledged unified communications platforms, they do offer some of the benefits, for example, the ability to have a phone number follow its owner, and the ability to integrate telephony into the PC. It is now quite common for telecom carriers to allow individuals to retrieve voicemail over a Web interface; yet another small example of unified communications.

Ultimately, the benefit of unified communications goes far beyond these simple examples. With an open platform, a unified communications system would allow for integration with almost any type of application, allowing for a much broader level of collaboration and information sharing than was ever before possible.

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