Unified Communications (UC) is the next wave of business communications, but its perceived complexity deters businesses from deploying UC solutions. This is an opportunity for service providers to deliver “UC as a Service.”

BroadSoft’s Alex Doyle and Microsoft’s Tim Fant recently presented how service providers can take our integrated Hosted UC solution to market. During the webinar, they shared best practices on how to deploy, introduce and market UC in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model and demonstrated how SMBs and large enterprises can reduce costs and increase productivity when they purchase a provider’s hosted UC solution.

Global Crossing provides Internet Protocol (IP) telecommunications services to customers worldwide. The company’s nearly 5,000 employees, who often work in teams that are distributed globally, were challenged by the need to communicate more effectively. Global Crossing addressed this problem by deploying the Microsoft® Unified Communications platform to provide users with a consolidated messaging environment for voice, e-mail, instant messaging and presence, and audio, video, and Web conferencing. By deploying the Microsoft solution, Global Crossing has reduced costs, improved employee communications and helped boost employee efficiency. The project is expected to produce annual benefits of $4.3 million when fully deployed and will pay for itself in seven months.

Layered Tech provides IT infrastructure, including dedicated servers, managed hosting, and grid computing, to businesses of all sizes. To offer its customers maximum choice, the company added virtualization technology to its offerings. Layered Tech participated in the Microsoft® Go-Live program for the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology, which permitted the company to deliver services based on Hyper-V to customers even before the product’s official release. With Hyper-V in its portfolio of server products, Layered Tech can provide robust hosting at a fraction of the cost of maintaining dedicated servers, giving the company an important edge in this competitive industry. Layered Tech is also simplifying management of customers’ servers with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

NedFox is an independent software vendor (ISV) that specialises in end-to-end solutions for retailers. Until recently, the company provided proprietary, on-premises systems, but its management team saw an opportunity to diversify into Software + Services. Through the Microsoft® Software + Services Incubation Center Program, the company was introduced to Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Siennax, which helped NedFox to bring its new hosted solution Retail Vista to market.

Insurance wholesale broker Swett & Crawford sends and receives more than one million e-mail messages each month, and for its 900+ users the availability and reliability of an e-mail solution is critical to business. Swett & Crawford was still relying on the IBM Lotus Notes-based e-mail infrastructure that was using when it divested from its parent company two years earlier, and it was increasingly difficult to find resources to maintain that infrastructure. Swett & Crawford decided not only to migrate off the Notes platform, but it also decided to seek an external partner who could maintain the entire messaging infrastructure. Its choice? USA.NET and its hosted messaging solution based on Microsoft® Exchange Server. The decision frees the Swett & Crawford IT department to add value elsewhere within the company while enabling easy access to a mail system that is more reliable and more flexible.

Telstra Business Systems, an Australian provider of IT integration and management solutions, needed to improve the performance of its own enterprise network. Because of increased business from new customers, government agencies, and business partners, the performance of the network was reduced. To resolve this, Telstra Business Systems upgraded its server software to Windows Server® 2008 and used features such as Read-Only Domain Controllers and Hyper-V™ server virtualization. Since the upgrade, the company has significantly improved network performance to continue its excellent customer service levels to customers. It has also reduced costs by consolidating servers. In addition, IT administrators spend less time on routine maintenance and more time improving the system and responding to customer calls.

Vodafone Essar is a subsidiary of Vodafone Plc, a leading player in the global mobile telephony industry. Vodafone Essar operates in more than 16 circles in India and has over 45 million subscribers, which is about 26 percent of India’s total mobile subscriber base. Vodafone plans to launch pan India services very soon. Vodafone required a Web portal that would enable it to provide various services, including e-commerce, to its large subscriber base. The portal is envisaged to integrate with its backend systems, to provide several services to Vodafone’s partners. Apart from robustness and scalability, high availability, security and flexibility of the solution were also of prime importance. Microsoft proposed a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Customer Care Framework 2006, Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 and Microsoft Connected Services Framework 3.0. Vodafone’s portal is live and has garnered good feedback from customers, partners and internal teams.

As an entertainment company, MTV Networks must ensure the free flow of ideas and content. However, the company’s previous portal infrastructure wasn’t helping much, as end users could not publish their own content. MTV Networks standardized on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, upon which the company deployed a new intranet portal, a Viacom corporate portal, and multiple Internet sites. Self-service content publishing enables groups across the company to communicate better, while rich collaboration and search features are helping global employees to easily find and share information. With Office SharePoint Server, MTV Networks is benefitting from a standardized portal platform that delivers new capabilities in a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective manner, and will serve the company well into the future.