Unify, the company formerly known as Siemens Enterprise Communications, today took the wraps off a new SaaS-based workspace solution called Circuit that gives business users access to a range of collaboration and communications tools from any device, all via a single interface. Circuit is the official brand name of the effort previously referred to as Project Ansible, which the company first discussed in June 2013.
Circuit is a a WebRTC-based clientless platform that delivers voice, video, screen sharing, messaging and file sharing capabilities in an integrated way to drive productivity. As a result, says CMO Bill Hurley, “people can focus on their work instead of focusing on the mode of communication to get the work done.”
As discussed in the March issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, a TMC publication, this solution was created in collaboration with Frog Design, a German company that has produced award-winning designs for Apple, and worked with other top-shelf companies such as Disney and Sony.
The offering now known as Circuit has been in beta mode with between 400 and 500 users at 25 to 30 companies in the past few months. Unify employees have also been using the service. Circuit becomes generally available starting Oct. 28.
Unify is offering 60-day free trials of Circuit, and customers that sign on for a one-year contract within the first few months of the launch can extend that free period even longer. Circuit will be priced at $14.95 per seat per month.
Circuit will be available directly from a special website, but Unify is also pushing the offering to existing customers, small businesses, and line of business operations through its internal sales team, and to large-scale customers via its channel partners. The channel is an important and growing component of Unify’s efforts, says Hurley, noting that many of the company’s recent hires (including himself) have strong channel backgrounds.
While there are a multitude of unified communications offerings already on the market, Hurley says many of them are not elegant solutions but, like Frankenstein, are stitched together from different piece parts, which are often brought in via acquisition. Circuit, meanwhile, offers an easy-to-use way to collaborate and share and find documents, even as users move between different endpoints.
“In Circuit, you just swipe from one device to another,” he says.
Circuit joins Unify’s existing OpenScape portfolio, which has small business, enterprise, cloud, contact center, UC, and vertical applications components. Hurley says Unify will continue to invest in and grow its OpenScape business, for which he adds the company has a large embedded base. Certain aspects of Circuit can be found in version 8 of OpenScape, Hurley says, and the company expects to bring the platforms together from an experience perspective over time.
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
