Converged Communications for ISPs - Appiant Technologies' inUnison service offered to Internet service providers - Brief Article

ISP Business, April, 2001

Appiant Technologies has relationships with Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, MiraPoint, and SpanLink. The company uses its Cisco connections in its latest release -- built on Cisco's uOne unified communications platform, Appiant's inUnison is a fully hosted service offered to service providers (wireless or ISP) and local exchange carriers (LECs).

InUnison supplies for the providers' customers a unified communications platform, allowing them, for example, to retrieve e-mail via a standard telephone connection and voicemail via text-to speech processing through a PC.

In addition to communication management, the platform provides other management tools which can also be accessed and manipulated both by phone and PC, including creating calendars, contact management, and task management.

The modular design of inUnison offers several packaged service bundles to providers, allowing them to purchase only those services they require for their subscribers.

Additional features to subscribers include Single Number Reach, which allows the service to route inbound calls to the user's home, work, or cell phone until the user is found (and then take a message if not found); call screening; outbound calling from within the portal; and VoIP (PC phone) calling.

Because of the unified nature of the communications platform, subscribers can access their messages from any Internet-connected device or standard telephone from anywhere in the world.