In early June, CommuniGate introduced Pronto!, a Flash-based client that is focused on unifying various forms of communication, including e-mail, IP telephony, instant messaging, RSS feeds, video, calendaring, blogs, etc. Pronto! is designed for use with any Flash 9-compatible browser and is platform independent, running on Windows-, Linux- and Mac OS X-based browsers. Pronto! requires no plug-ins, allowing user accounts to be accessed from any compatible browser.

Pronto! runs in less than 400 kilobytes of memory and operates in memory space, not in the browser cache, which CommuniGate claims provides better security than competing offerings. The user interface allows resizing of windows and a variety of other features that often are available only in desktop-based clients.

Pronto! is the front end for CommuniGate Pro v5.1, a highly scalable and standards-compliant server platform that operates on both Windows and OS X servers. At the low end, CommuniGate Pro Core Server is quite inexpensive, starting at just under $34 per seat for 25 users and dropping to $27 per seat for 200 users. CommuniGate also offers carrier-grade servers for supporting very large numbers of users. A variety of antispam and antivirus plug-ins are also available from vendors like Cloudmark, Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos and Mailshell.

Why consider using CommuniGate’s server platform and Pronto! as a front end, particularly when other messaging systems receive so much more attention from the press and others? There are a variety of reasons, including lower cost than many other messaging platforms, scalability, ease of deployment and a very capable user experience with the Pronto! interface. The integration of various types of communications in Pronto!, coupled with the fact that the interface is written in Flash and the benefits of the back-end server, makes the system worth a serious look.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.