Moving Unified Communications to Mobile DevicesMoving Unified Communications to Mobile Devices

The news that Cisco has acquired Orative highlights the growing interest in extending unified communications to the mobile market. With the deal, Cisco will be extending its Unified Communications applications to mobile devices. With Orative Enterprise Software, mobile phone users can coordinate conversations, collaborate with colleagues, view information on Unity voicemail messages, screen unwanted telephone calls, and securely access personal and corporate phone books. Mobile devices will now be able to use Cisco Unified CallManager for call control, Cisco MeetingPlace for collaboration and Cisco Unity as the voicemail platform.

Cisco isn’t the only vendor exploring the ways to extend unified communications to mobile devices. I was recently briefed by Avaya on some of the moves it’s making in this space, and I have to say, I was very impressed.

Avaya’s goal is to extend its One-X unified communications capabilities to mobile devices, seamlessly, easily and cost-effectively. Here are a few of the highlights—more news will come on this front in the following weeks, so keep your eye out:

Easy Mobile Switcher lets users move from their desk phone to their mobile phone (and back) with the touch of a button. How often have you started a call on your cell phone on your way into the office, then had to either waste minutes while you continued the call on the cell when you were actually in your office, or had to re-dial into the call from your landline, and hang up your cell? Easy Mobile Switcher eliminates that hassle—and what’s really cool is how it works: When you dial a call from your cell phone you can in fact route it through the desk phone switch. Then, when you get into the office, all you need to do is pick up your desktop phone to transition over. And because the call is going through the switch, you get all the telephony features you do on your desk phone. Even better for the bean counters: You won’t pay excruciatingly high cell phone rates for international calls—all you pay for are the minutes.

And how’s this for cool savings? Avaya is working on a plan to route calls through one cellular provider or another, to leverage free mobile to mobile calls, allowing users to effectively make most of their calls with “free” minutes, regardless of who they’re calling, or what network they’re on. Look for this feature late next year.

Separately you can also send a desk phone to your cell phone, a feature Avaya’s Humphrey Chen calls the “marriage saver,” because it lets employees continue speaking and collaborating with colleagues while they commute home—and the colleagues never even know the person has switched from office to car (or train, or foot).

Beyond these cost-saving and usability features, Avaya’s Portable Communications Dashboard will include synchronized call logs (one-way from desk to cell), so that users can see what calls they missed while on the road; one place to check voice mail; access to the corporate address book; rich co-worker caller ID (rich caller ID, for all data); mobile presence (on hook, off hook); and additional platform support.