Long View Systems, an MSPmentor 100 company, is the latest managed service provider to push aggressively into the unified communications market. And I expect plenty of MSPs to follow Long View’s lead — especially as nimble UC start-ups like Unison Technologies counter entrenched giants like Cisco Systems and Microsoft.
Long View, based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, is now certified on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Release 2. And the company is blending its unified communications expertise with SharePoint and Exchange Server initiatives.
Long View isn’t alone. Nearly 30 percent of MSPmentor 100 survey participants now offer some form of unified communications to their customers. I expect that figure to climb rapidly as Microsoft, Cisco and even the open source world continue to ramp up their unified communication efforts.
Sometime this week, Unison Technologies is expected to launch a free, closed-source unified communications system on Canonical’s Ubuntu Server Edition (an open source Linux distribution). Eager Unison adopters include Intermedia, a New York-based MSP that originally built its business around hosted Exchange services. Unison is now reaching out to additional MSPs for potential hosting relationships.
I’m not endorsing any particular unified communications product — but the convergence of unified communications with managed services is undeniable.
MSPmentor is updated multiple times daily. Don’t miss a single post. Subscribe to our Enewsletter, RSS and Twitter feeds.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Posted In: Platforms
Tags: Canonical | Intermedia | Long View Systems | Managed Unified Communications | Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 | Ubuntu Server Edition | Unison Technologies
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
Get Started: Visit our new 
My 30 second review of Fonality as a UC platform for MSPs:
A year ago I started looking for a small business UC solution, and began testing Fonality products. One year later, I have just completed my first install of Trixbox on a client site (I’ve been using it in-hose for a while) with bandwidth.com SIP trunking over data T1. The Trixbox platform is affordable due to its open source (Asterisk) skelton, and so far has been a good fit for my 7 extension trial client. I do wish their partner program had more business development tools, and would like to see more organized documentation. They also are lacking in end-user training materials. The VAR account managers are both super useful and responsive, and sometimes unresponsive. The support is fantastic, so long as you call in; web and e-mail tickets sometimes take weeks to get a response from. I would also like to see better options for monitoring the system, and for easy backup and disaster recovery. The settings are automatically backed up, but the voice prompts and such would have to be re-recorded, and voice mail would be lost unless you opt for a live backup server.
-d
D: Thanks for the note regarding Fonality. We recently profiled them in The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source companies and their partner programs.
Keep the honest feedback about Fonality coming. We speak with their management team a few times per quarter, and will certainly share your feedback with them.