Putting unified communications in the cloud

Rafael Laguna, CEO Open-Xchange, says the cloud offers scalability and flexibility at a lower cost.

“Email is still the number one communication tool for almost all information workers and is increasingly accessible everywhere and anytime”
-Rafael Laguna

Today, more and more SMBs and enterprises consider moving their communication infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud as the benefits of SaaS (Software as a Service) are just too compelling. Most notably, better scalability and more flexibility at lower cost - without initial investments in hardware and software. In 2009, Gartner predicted that 20 percent of the commercial email market will be using SaaS by 2012. By comparison, in 2007, SaaS represented one percent of the commercial email market.

Email is still the number one communication tool for almost all information workers and increasingly accessible everywhere and anytime. BlackBerry and iPhone are no longer reserved for just executives.

Besides email, new communication tools such as instant messaging and Twitter, as well as social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn entered our lives. The downside is that we run the risk of being distracted and overwhelmed with too much information dispersed in too many channels.

Open-Xchange is a leading e-mail and collaboration solution used by more than 15 million people worldwide as hosted and on-premises business-class e-mail and groupware. Open-Xchange introduced a new groupware concept called 'Social OX', which aggregates email and contact information in one place -- whether personal or business -- avoiding time-consuming searching and giving users access to information anywhere, anytime and with any device. Before we end up in confusion with lots of e-mail accounts and address books, Open-Xchange overcomes the barriers between the variety of desktop and web applications, where we store and handle our multiple addresses, appointments, tasks and documents.

"People today use a number of different e-mail addresses and social network tools to store contact information generated from their personal and professional lives," said Philbert Shih, Senior Analyst, Tier1 Research. "Social OX is designed to bring the contact information stored in email and social networks closer together, allowing the user to control everything from a single platform. This is a very useful innovation that messaging vendors are only starting to catch on to." The other key feature of unified communications is the integration of VoIP. By combining Open-Xchange with VoIP and Virtual PBX solutions, businesses can replace their traditional phone lines -- saving on phone bills. Moreover, the combination of contact information from email and collaboration with IP-based telephony, fax and other services provides users unmatched ease of use for their day-to-day communications.

Freedom to switch

While more and more small- and medium-size enterprises will move their communication applications into a public cloud, larger organisations will most likely prefer to run their applications in-house or in a private cloud. To avoid lock-in to the cloud, users must ask for SaaS applications that can also run without any changes on-premises on the customer's own computers. This provides users with the freedom to switch between SaaS and on-premises -- with minimal migration effort.

In addition, CIOs have to ensure that their communication solutions use standard formats like vCard for contact information, iCal/ICS for appointments and the good old RFCs around e-mail. This is key to keep control over their data. If you lose the control over data formats, you lose control of the data itself, creating a lock-in that commits users to specific applications and services. Open-Xchange is built on Open Source standards that allow users to re-use, import, export, and share their data as needed. And open standards enable integration of business applications such as CRM, ERP and BI to the communication infrastructure - consolidating previously disparate islands of information. Communication and business applications merging to an integrated 'web desktop' will be the next evolutionary step of Open Source software and the next step of development -- free and open data in the cloud.

Rafael Laguna was co-founder of Open-Xchange Inc. and Chairman of the board until he took over responsibility as CEO in January 2008. Laguna was crucial to Open-Xchange's extention to Software as a Service in 2006 and formed the partnership with the world's largest web host by known servers, 1&1 Internet AG.