Unified communications, hosting and SMBs are a perfect three-way match: Small businesses are better off letting experts take care of the increasingly complex world of UC. Three deals -- two within the last week -- demonstrate that vendors and service providers see hosted UC services as a great way to bring a raft of telecom and IT features and applications to a traditionally hard-to-reach segment. 
Any doubt that telepresence is a vital element of an organization's repertoire of communications tools ended this week. The first sign of approval was from Cisco, which closed its acquisition of Tandberg. The second was from Mother Nature, which grounded much of the world's air traffic.
Other companies mentioned this week include ShoreTel, Clarus Systems, Landacorp, Vonage, T-Mobile, AT&T, Whaleback, Truphone, Apple, BrightCom, IBM, UPS, Skype, Salesforce.com, Frontier Communications and Silanis.
People who deal with unified communications on a daily basis take it as an article of faith that these platforms benefit users in a number of ways. What is changing is that vendors -- including the big vendors -- increasingly see UC as the next logical step and companies are deploying it based on hard-nosed business scenarios. The days of "build it and they will come" are gone.
Carl Weinschenk
Unified Views
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