Unified Communications

The Asterisk Consultants at Asterisk Consulting understand that while the flexibility and features of Unified Communication Solutions have triggered substantial and ever-increasing worldwide acceptance, IP PBX reliability cannot be compromised. That’s why our systems are designed to ensure maximum uptime by providing built-in failover and load balancing mechanisms, ruggedized components, monitoring capabilities with automated alerts, and a variety of utilities for increased reliability. 

The solution is an Open Standards Unified Communications Platform (UCP) with Asterisk as the VoIP telephony core and the main distributed architecture comprising SIP Phone Systems Proxy’s based on Khamailio.

When designing an UCP it is important to pay close attention to the architectural requirements. Our designs are based on 4 key elements:

• Reliability – complete and automatic failover.
• Scalability - System expansion is flexible and seamless.
• Ease of use – Unified Communication features such as conferencing, contact centre and soft phones enables users to maximise their productivity. Find me and presence applications means employees no longer miss calls when not at their desks. Mobile workers can easily locate their extensions themselves to any other handset on a temporary basis, allowing free movement between offices while keeping their extensions.
• Simple management – Deploying an IP telephone system can free businesses and organisations from the proprietary hold of the legacy Asterisk PBX manufacturer. Adds, move and changes don’t always require assistance as this could be done internally therefore reducing wait time but more importantly saving significant sums of money.

What is Unified Communications?

Unified Communications can mean many things to many people. Some people believe unified communications is ‘the ability to be contacted anytime everywhere anyhow’. This definition implies that the person being contacted is contactable whenever, wherever and however another party wishes to contact them. This should not be the case – the whole point of unified communications is to enable communication and collaboration by mutually consenting parties via the most appropriate method at the time of communication.

This introduces the concept of ‘presence’. A person’s presence status indicates their availability to be contacted at a particular time and if so, their preferred method of receiving communications whether it be by mail, telephone, social media or in person. Presence is at the core of unified communications and hence any definition of a unified communications platform should be built around presence.

The goal of unified communications is to provide improved business processes and, accordingly, a return on investment. Asterisk Consulting provide an open standards Unified Communications Platform (UCP) with Asterisk as the VoIP telephony core.

“Unified communications is a set of tools that improve communications and collaboration as well as broader business processes by enabling a person or application to communicate with another person using a single address across multiple modalities. Unified communications enables these communications to take place via the most appropriate of these modalities based on the contacted person’s presence status”.