Clouding up unified communications

Everyone who is anyone is talking up the potential for moving hosted unified communications (UC) applications to a cloud computing framework. There are benefits and trade-offs to contemplate, because there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Benefits include the potential to cut communications costs while not losing features and the ability to scale services up and down depending upon the need for them. However, companies will have to give up some control (but to be fair, this is true of all hosted apps) if they go into the cloud for a UC solution, with security being the biggest concern.

Last week at VoiceCon, Siemens demoed a proof-of-concept by putting OpenScape into Amazon's EC2 cloud, IBM came out with LotusLive Engage -- as a software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering - and NEC was preaching the virtues of being "cloud ready."

Hosted offerings are especially in vogue this year, because a service-based offering doesn't require large capital expenditures and can be paid on a month-to-month basis, leading to conservation of cash in tight times.

For more:
- SearchVoIP Oz has the article [1].

Related articles
Siemens goes to Amazon EC2 cloud for voice and UC apps [2]
NEC was embracing the cloud at VoiceCon 2009: BoT (Best of Twitter) [3]