Unify Circuit – the new immersive unified communications, collaboration and business process platform will be launced in Australia in late 2016.
Unify Circuit has been applauded by analysts for its attractive, intuitive “single-pane-of-glass” user experience in its aggregation of voice, video, email, text, social and business process integration.
Unify Circuit has been available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on overseas-hosted servers since early 2015. You can register for a free trial at https://www.circuit.com/register
We believe Circuit will rapidly gain popularity in Australia when it is hosted locally in late 2016.
The next stage will be to launch intelligent connectors into on-premise OpenScape Voice (OSV) environments. A third wave of innovation will include integration to on-premise OpenScape Business and OpenScape 4000.
This will allow customers to choose a pure cloud service, leverage a premise-based solution, or take the best from both worlds as their needs evolve.
Unify customers will be aware of the brand’s reputation for seamless transition for OpenScape and HiPath customers, so their existing investments in equipment will be protected.
“I chose [Unify, formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications] as my communications system based on price and architecture,” said David Nettles, Director IT Operations, Rayonier, a leading international forest products company. “Circuit is a game changing vision that really drives home that decision!”
Unify Circuit has been developed in partnership with world-leading product strategy and design consultancy, frog. Their brief was to extend beyond the promises of unified communications (UC) to redefine how today’s #Anywhere Worker interacts, communicates and collaborates.
Circuit will empower teams to engage in rich and meaningful conversations across virtually any communications channel or device resulting in dramatically improved team productivity. The new platform is designed to deliver increased business performance through real-time engagement by unifying voice, video, social communications, search, business process applications, and other channels into a seamless, immersive, intuitive experience.
For example, Circuit makes it easy to start, follow and participate in conversations, regardless of format or device. Text messages, chat records, addresses and tags are indexed alongside contact information and email messages, all of which are stored and available for comprehensive searching. Voicemails, phone calls, and video conferences are automatically transcribed for an easily-referenced record of meetings, and can be transferred from laptop to phone. SMS messages appear on tablets and desktops.
By providing connectors to our communications platforms, customers will be able to consume rich enterprise voice and video services on the Circuit client and allow users to interwork to other voice and video endpoints connected to their existing communications platform. This approach will allow current customers a smooth transition to the New Way to Work. New customers will benefit from the reliability, flexibility and cost effectiveness of a pure software deployment in their data center, bringing together the value of new deployment models, mobility and collaboration.
Benefits of Unify Circuit
- Circuit will support Google Chrome and other WebRTC–enabled browsers.
- In addition to desktops, users will be supported on several mobile platforms, with apps for Apple devices in the initial release and Android apps following quickly after.
- Seamless High Definition audio/video, 1:1, and group conversations
- Scheduled and ad-hoc conferencing
- Rich, textual messaging
- Enterprise social networking
- Search across persistent conversations, people and files
- Cross-device access to all messages, files, and real-time communication and collaboration capabilities (video, voice and screen sharing)
- Contact integration for LinkedIn and Outlook
- An outstanding and guided user experience ensuring fast and simple ramp-up
The key to Circuit lies in the way it removes the boundaries separating multiple communication channels and business process applications and integrates them into a ‘single pane of glass’ providing visibility across a workgroup, an enterprise and the Web in real time.
With Circuit, challenging or time-consuming tasks such as searching for information across multiple sources (e.g. text, email, and social channels), conducting live/virtual meetings, or generating transcripts of conference calls becomes as easy as making a phone call.
Unify Circuit is designed to address core challenges faced by so many organisations today: enterprises are at the center of a complex web of interconnected systems that are hard to manage; companies are failing to drive the full value of those investments; and, while communications tools increasingly play a more central role in business, the user experience is broken.
Circuit defines a clear path forward to next-gen solutions through an evolutionary approach for our existing customers and creates an opportunity for Unify to reach a wide range of new customers while leading our industry to the next generation of user experience.
Justin Maguire, Executive Creative Director, frog, said: “Today’s emerging millennials and knowledge workers are working in new ways, but are using yesterday’s tools, spending so much time orchestrating work, they have little time to actually do work. Circuit will reduce frustration and boost the performance of a company’s biggest asset – their people – because employees will love using it. Its delightful user experience will encourage enterprise-wide adoption and seamless integration into business processes to drive dramatic productivity improvements.”
The new platform will offer a seamless experience across desktop, tablet and mobile devices to amplify team collaboration and enable new ways to work.
Key Features of Unify Circuit
Ease-of-Use – manage the daily flow of communications into rich and meaningful conversations in an intelligent, intuitive and personalised way. With unparalleled ease-of-use, organisations can anticipate higher adoption rates, reduced training time and expense, and enhanced team productivity. Smart, intelligent design lets Circuit adapt to the user rather than the other way around.
Persistence – Circuit turns meetings into automatically-created, persistent, shared Circuit Spaces, with associated files, transcripts of voice and video, conversations and participants. Keeping all conversations and content available, Circuit makes meetings more meaningful.
Contextual Search – Circuit will redefine search within communication and collaboration applications and extend it beyond traditional boundaries to include, for example, transcribed voicemails, emails, social aggregated content, text messages, and beyond. With Thought Trails™, users will have real-time, searchable access to the content they need by topic and conversation, even easily finding colleagues who are working on similar projects and topics.
A Single View – Circuit will bring together synchronous and asynchronous communication channels into one, intuitive, frictionless, “rich canvas” view. With Circuit, users will no longer have to jump in and out of applications, but can communicate and collaborate within a single application seamlessly across desktop and mobile devices.
Integration – Circuit will be designed to work the way business works by tying into common business processes. Circuit comes with built-in Connectors for out of the box integration to leading applications, like Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and Google, and to several social media platforms. Powerful APIs and SDKs will enable in-house IT teams and third-party developers to easily build enhancements and industry-specific solutions, while broadening integration opportunities to other business process solutions.
“Circuit integrates all the bits and pieces that we have been talking about in UC, but never saw delivered,” said Nicole Dufft, Pierre Audoin Consultants.
“Based on WebRTC, Unify Circuit integrates and puts into context all the tools we use in our daily work routines: voice, web and video communication, team collaboration, social networking, business process applications, content management, enterprise search, and even some analytics. Equally important to this ‘contextual integration,’ usability has been a key focus in developing Circuit. Circuit actually looks like a product people would love using.”
“Circuit is Unify’s way of providing an ‘it just works’ experience to the user, delivering a full aggregation of the traditional UC stack, social software, and business applications in an easily consumable interface on the desktop as well as mobile devices,” said Michael Brandenburg, Frost & Sullivan.
“Circuit is not about ripping and replacing existing back-end UC platforms, but instead, focuses on making user consumption of these platforms a much more engaging experience. Circuit is a solid representation of what the promise of unified communications was, or is, supposed to deliver to the end-user and a great example of how enterprise communications should work and how we as users want it to work. For me at least, it redefines how I want to interact, communicate, and collaborate as part of daily work.”
In keeping with the company’s open systems heritage, Circuit will avoid the user “lock-outs” of proprietary solutions, and will offer the industry’s first true use of WebRTC, the new standard for embedding voice, text, and video communications within web browser communications. With its strong track record of “never leaving customers behind,” the company said one of Circuit’s key design considerations was providing an evolutionary approach to helping customers achieve the benefits of next-gen solutions, safeguarding technology investments made by its customers now and in the months to come in its existing, industry-leading OpenScape and HiPath portfolio for small and large enterprises.
For more information, go to https://www.circuit.com/
To arrange a demonstration of Unify Circuit, call Evotec – your Unify Premium Partner on 1300 133 996.