Unified comms: an industry in evolution

This week's Unified Communications show in London provided an interesting cross-section of the industry at this stage in its evolution: Several IP PBXs, lots of consultancies and integrators, a dash of fixed-mobile convergence, plenty of vendors keen to shout about their interoperability with Microsoft's OCS - and more managed or hosted Internet telephony services than you could shake a handset at.

Part of the attraction of the hosted approach is that it enables smaller companies to get access to phone services that would otherwise be too expensive to install. An example is call recording - this is pretty much mandatory in some sectors now, and very useful in others, but has typically been hardware-based.

Offering it instead as part of a managed service also makes it location-independent, says comms provider 8el, which announced its call recording feature at the show. It mean that even homeworkers can toggle call recording on and off once they've logged into the system, said MD Justin Hamilton-Martin. He added that the recordings are then available from anywhere too, via a secure web interface.

The growing popularity of Internet-hosted telephony also reflects our growing willingness to accept other services on-line and via the web - in particular, email - noted Colette Bean, business development director of Velofone, which used the show to launch its push into fixed-mobile convergence.

She added that being Internet-hosted means the company can provide its services anywhere that the user can get a connection. So its Velofone Mobile and Data Roaming services include WiFi roaming, with dual-mode handsets that automatically detect a usable hotspot and switch into IP mode. Leave the hotspot, and they drop back to cellular connectivity.

"A business service has to be simple, effective, and look professional," Bean said. "The important thing is that business users won't change their behaviour to save the company money, so you have to take that into account and make it seamless."

PMR over IP

It's not just ordinary voice telephony that's migrating to IP - other voice tools are headed that way too, including private mobile radio, or PMR.

At least, so said InTechnology, which has built a UK-wide managed push-to-talk (PTT) system. This offers walkie-talkie style communications on a variety of devices, including PCs, PDAs and mobile phones - press a button and speak, and all the others in your group immediately hear your message.