At the recent UC Summit, Microsoft's Eric Swift talked about the importance of hosted Unified Communications going forward. Why? According to Swift, small and medium business in particular will gravitate towards hosting because the technology is difficult to manage, even more difficult than the IP telephony that is by itself a bit problematic at UC's core. "It's a no-brainer because you need economies of scale to assemble the mature data center management talent, process and tools required."
We agree completely about the need for economies of scale as well as process and tools specific to UC to help experts in UC successfully manage it. But an alternative to hosting the entire Unified Communications stack is hosting only UC's management. That's why we built Streamline: so the Managed Service Providers with NOC staffs that live and breathe UC can manage SMB's in-house UC environments for them.
Streamline can manage centralized, hosted environments too. But many businesses prefer the security and competitive advantage of having unified communications technology in house, and Streamline is there to give SMBs a fully managed alternative to hosted UC that's unable to differentiate them from everyone else using the same hosted collaborative tools.
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