CommuniGate, a company that was touting unified communications (UC) before most of us even knew there was such a thing as UC, has spiffed up its flagship “Pronto!” UC client with the ability to make and receive Web-based VoIP calls. At first blush, that doesn’t sound all that exciting, so Broadband Business Forecast thought we might take a look at what’s going on.

What’s happening is that Pronto!, which is just about the only UC offering on the market based on Adobe’s Flash, has grown up into what’s commonly known as Web 2.0. The new VoIP features support remote access to a corporate PBX and includes such business features as “click to call” from the address book, programmable function keys, and speed dial. Oh, and Flash supports high definition (HD) video (for those with enough broadband bandwidth).

With Pronto! 1.5 newly released and, as we learned, version 2.0 steaming down the track, the folks at CommuniGate are out pounding the drums. Urging BBF to take a look was CommuniGate’s Business Development Vice President Jon Doyle. Here’s what he told us:

No Miracle

There’s been more than a little noise surrounding UC during the past few months, what with Microsoft jumping into the game, just for starters. But CommuniGate thinks Microsoft has done it all wrong.

“Look at Microsoft,” says Doyle. “You have six or seven different products, and you glue them all together somehow.” In contrast, he continues, CommuniGate has just one product – one that does the same as all the stuff Microsoft is offering. “It’s a technical thing,” Doyle says. “It’s not that we did some miracle or something. It’s just that our product is integrated into one binary.”

Moreover, he points to “our partnership with Adobe and the Flash technology” as a critical differentiator. “Where everybody is focused on putting it (a UC client) on the machine, and Java technology…nobody is really doing anything around (Flash) but ourselves.”

The Framework

“We needed a client strategy that could morph all these things together” (i.e., multimedia, IM, VoIP), and what the company came up with is “really not a client. It’s a framework that sits on a desktop,” he explains. And by building that framework in Flash, it can run in any browser and on any operating system Flash supports (which is just about every one in the market today).

And what’s coming down the track, Doyle continued, follows in the same pattern. Version 2.0 of Pronto! will be an installable client, “just like Outlook,” but it will run on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). That, he says, means it doesn’t even need to depend on having a browser: All the PC will need is to be connected to broadband. The way it’s being designed, Doyle says, is that third-party software developers can build software, such as perhaps a shopping cart, that simply snaps into the AIR-based Pronto!

One thing that’s not changing is the target. CommuniGate sells its offerings to business users with anywhere from five to 50 million clients. For the smallest, it hosts CommuniGate as a software as a service (SaaS) offering. For the biggest customers, it’s however they want to do it.

“If you’re a Cisco, you’re selling to telecoms,” Doyle says, but a Cisco can’t address small business effectively. The way CommuniGate does business, “we can do either end of the spectrum, and we’ve proved it,” he says. “We have dozens of companies that have nine accounts, and we have Tele2,” he says (Swedish telco Tele2 has been a CommuniGate customer for about three years, reselling CommuniGate with an installed base that’s now topped nine million clients).

CommuniGate has beaten the pants off of Microsoft in offering UC using the SaaS business model, Doyle insists. “Microsoft admitted on a panel I was on that their SaaS is still in the works,” he crows. That means, for a small company looking for UC, “you have to turn to a company that can package it up like ours.”

And It’s Free

And then there are the really small companies, with five or fewer seats. CommuniGate has a deal for them, too: It’s called free.

“We understood we can’t sell to this segment of the market, so we let them have it,” Doyle says. Actually, it used to be a free trial program, but about two years ago, the company simply said “take it and use it.” The only caveat is that, for free, companies don’t get live customer support; they have to go to the online support forums.

The payoff: “They’re going to talk about it (the CommuniGate UC service) when they go somewhere where they can pay for it,” Doyle says. >>Jon Doyle, CommuniGate, 415/383-7164<<

BBF’s Take On The Situation

We won’t argue the semantic niceties of whether what CommuniGate is building is really some sort of specialized browser – but gosh, that’s really what it is in a lot of ways. And, at the same time, it’s a communications client.

Support of VoIP is, of course, a given – but that’s not a broadband application. But because the client will handle the gamut of UC features -- we’re talking e-mail, voice mail, mobility and a unified address for multiple services -- all without the need for a browser or other communications client. Presence, like VoIP, is a given these days with any UC claim. CommuniGate also has other niceties, like scheduling. The kicker is that Adobe is a master at graphics so CommuniGate, by building on top of Adobe’s technology, is very likely coming up with business video that’s top notch, indeed high definition, assuming the video feed is HD and the viewer has adequate bandwidth.

It still should be remembered that, essentially, CommuniGate is sitting in front of a vast array of other provisioning software and hardware – such e-mail servers as Exchange, video servers and what-have-you that do need to be tied together. The average hi-tech business user these days is hooked to multiple such services, like it or not, and while there is real value in an offering that can unify them – such as CommuniGate – there’s a lot more to consider in the market as well.

The bottom line, we think, is that CommuniGate has proved that after 16 years of touting UC, it commands a real market position in a broadband-communications ecosystem – with a claim of 12,000 customers and 130 million client installations.  And we’re even ready to say CommuniGate hasn’t re-invented the wheel; in many ways, it invented it in the first place.

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Feb. 4, 2008, issue of Broadband Business Forecast, an online news channel published on TelecomWeb.com. It appears here with permission. For more information on Broadband Business Forecast, click here.