UC
Despite the promise of cost savings and extensibility, open source VOIP and UC platforms have thus far failed to catch on in the enterprise market. A new entrant aims to change that. Privately held eZuce’s launch of “openUC,” a low-cost open-source unified communications platform, reflects the continued impact of tight IT budgets. By leveraging open source, eZuce provides integrated voice, video, messaging and conferencing for a list price of $65 per user, per year. Despite recent economic improvement, 82% of organizations are facing flat or falling IT budgets in 2011, up from 78% in 2010. As a result, implementation success comes from providing strategic value while minimizing both capital and operational expenses. Alternatives such as cloud-based services and open-source derived products have the potential to reduce these costs while meeting business application requirements. Enterprise IT managers should evaluate open source and cloud-based alternatives to on-premise commercial solutions for their potential to reduce upfront and ongoing costs.
