Vendor integrates telephony into Google apps

Voice Mobility does unified communications Google-style

Curious what a Google-provided – or at least Google-enabled – unified communications offering might look like? Look no further than vendor Voice Mobility, which this week integrated its enterprise messaging capabilities into the Google Apps suite.

Voice Mobility, based in Vancouver, provides enhanced messaging solutions to the enterprise and carrier markets. Its latest offering merges the vendor’s UCN Vmerge offering with Google’s suite of online applications, including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Contacts and Mobile.

Google earlier this year began pushing its full Google Apps suite to enterprise users, in part tapping an SI relationship with Cap-Gemini.

While Google offers some basic telephony and messaging capabilities via its Gmail and Google Talk applications – including some basic integration between the applications – it doesn’t offer full-blown voice or unified communications capabilities in the suite. Those capabilities have been long-anticipated, however, coming in part from technology obtained through its acquisition of Web-based messaging and communications provider Grand Central.

Voice Mobility’s offering demonstrates what a Google-driven unified communications offering might look like. At its core, the vendor’s UCN Vmerge offer enables full on-site or hosted enterprise PBX integration with Google’s Gmail service. At its core, the new offering lets users access voice, fax and email messages directly from their email accounts and synchronizes messages across all devices. Users can also:

• Send and receive voice and fax messages from Gmail
• Record and deposit voice conversations in Gmail
• Manage live calls from the desktop
• Click-to-dial internal and external numbers from any Google application
• Import Google Contacts into UCN Vmerge for remote access
• Utilize least-cost routing available from the enterprise PBX

Price is a major driver for such a service, with Google Apps starting at just $50 per user annually versus $500-plus for Microsoft Office, not including the cost of acquiring and running Microsoft server-side components such as Exchange or Office Communications Server.
Future versions of the integration will include PBX presence integration with Google Talk among other features, the company said. UCN Vmerge is compatible with the most PBX and Centrex solutions.