Businesses are looking for ways to meet the evolving needs of an increasingly distributed business network – employees, partners, suppliers and customers. Increasingly, they are seeking ways to extend key communications capabilities such as presence awareness and IM chat capabilities out to their business partners and customers. In particular they are turning to communications strategies that enable you to:

• Provide end users with the unified communications and collaboration (UC²) capabilities required to create more dynamic and flexible business systems, while managing multiple back-end telephony and audio video infrastructures.
• Deliver a single user experience across business applications and across communications and collaboration tools. In other words, allow a user to use the same interface to place a call through a softphone, to send an IM or to look up customer information in a business application.
• Support workers wherever they are – whether they work in a traditional office, are part of a mobile workforce or move between the two on a daily basis.