Unified Communications Service in the Cloud

Aswath Rao

Summary

• Pitch

• Customer Friction Points

• Proposal

Pitch

• Offer Unified Communications service

• Built as a cloud-ready application

• Addresses customers’ friction points

Friction Points

• Customers– Proprietary and expensive end-devices– Difficult to plan for incremental rollouts– Adding customers and partners to a UC session– Federation issues

• Protocol incompatibilities• Service incompatibilities

• Users– Interruptions due to availability of real-time presence

information– Perceived complexity

Proposal

• UC as a web application• Client is a browser that can accept dynamic

downloads• Server is an application running on a standard

web server• Do not use “trapezoidal” session setup

– Caller contacts the callee’s Server directly

• Presence Information is pulled, not pushed– It can be contact specific– Subscribe/Notify for change in status

Benefits • Every one of friction points have been addressed• Any device with a browser can be a client

– PC, Android mobile devices, purpose built ChromeOS-based desk phone– No Proprietary Clients

• Non-registered users can initiate a UC session– No loss of “network effect”– Incremental rollout is feasible– Late adopters can experience before signing up– Customers and partners can be part of a UC session

• Use of Single Server and Dynamic Download– No Federation related issues– Different domains– Different systems

• Privacy, especially of Presence information– Contact-specific– Delivered only when requested

• Infrastructure scales linearly with registration– No inter-server communication– Not dependent on the number of contacts of each user– Cloud ready