Beyond e-mail and collaboration: Unified communications as a hosted serviceRurik Bradbury, Unison Technologies

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Overview

• What is unified communications (‘UC’)?

• What is Unison?

• How is UC better than e-mail and collaboration?

• Is it popular?

• Why host it?

• What is involved in offering it?

• To offer UC, what are your options?

• Unison vs Microsoft

• Unison’s partner program

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What on earth is unified communications?

• E-mail

• Telephony– PBX, voicemail, unified

telephone numbers

• Instant messaging

• Calendaring

• Contacts

• Free/busy status

• Other stuff– Video conferencing?

– Screensharing?

Get all communications…

…in one place

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And what is Unison™? /1

• Unison is a server and a client that work together– Unison Server™ runs on Linux

– Unison Desktop™ runs on Windows/Linux

• Like Exchange + Outlook, but much better…

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What is Unison™? /2

With Unison Server, the Unison Desktop client gives users all communication in one desktop app:

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How is UC better than e-mail/collaboration?

– Makes a company “15% more productive”

– No more pointless pinging

– No more abuse of communications media (think: mass emails with 20 people CC:ed)

– No more juggling multiple apps and comms histories

– No more being unable to find important bits of info

– No more missing time-sensitive messages

“1 hour per user per day” saved

Source: Sage Research

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Is UC popular?

• Not yet common among SMBs

• A majority of enterprises testing UC (per Microsoft)

– SMBs will want it too – EVERYONE wants it when they see it

• Hosted UC growth of 355% from 2007-11 (per Radicati)

– But just 45% for e-mail and collaboration

• Fast approaching a ‘hockey stick’ upward curve:

Today, we are here

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So why ‘hosted’ UC? Customer benefits

Reliability Fully managed

Lower capital

investment

Core business

Flat costs after that

And also… telephony is now hostable!

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Why host UC? Hoster benefits

Not a commodity

Very fast-growing but little competition (unlike plain old e-mail and collaboration products)

High revenues and margins

Charge up to $50 per seat per month – margins up to 50%

Very, very sticky

A company’s entirecommunications arehosted with you

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What is involved in offering hosted UC?

Set them up in your own datacenter

Buy turnkey VoIP service wholesale from a telco:

Then you are ready to sell!

and others

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To offer UC, what are your options?

4 major options available to hosters today:

Solution Cost Complexity ‘Hostability’ Sales model

MicrosoftExchange + OCS + PBX

High High Good Direct + partners

IBM Lotus High High Not good Partners (for SMB sales)

Cisco Very high High Poor Direct + partners

Unison Low / free Low Good Partners only

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Unison vs MicrosoftKey points for hosters to compare:

Microsoft

How difficult to set up Easy Hard

Sales and marketing Little competition, anyone who sees it wants it

Well-known, but commoditized and hard

to get customers

Licensing fees Either free (ad-supported) or less than $4 / mo

More than $8 / mo

Revenues/seat/mo $40-50 for Unison

$15 for Exchange + OCS

Margins Around 50% Less than 15%

Your profit opportunity:

$20 profitper seat/mo

$2.25 profitper seat/mo

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Unison vs Microsoft hosting – bottom line

$20 in profit per seat per month (on $40 revenue)

MicrosoftExchange + OCS

Just $2.25 in profit per seat per month (on $15 revenue)

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The Unison Partner Program

• Join for free

• Offer Unison as a hosted service

• Volume discounts

Learn more at unison.com/parallels

Or e-mail us at partner@unison.com

Thanks for your time!