Here It Comes

The whole point of having a virtual desktop infrastructure is so you can move your office wherever it needs to be, and access it through whatever you can carry with you. And the whole point of unified communications is so you can integrate all the information and voice traffic you receive into a single console. The problem up to now is that it's been hard to do both - to stream the voice traffic from the UC system to the virtual desktop using channels made for the job, so your conversations don't sound like synthesizer effects, to cut a long story short your performance doesn't go down like a Miley Cyrus concert.

At VMworld in Las Vegas this week, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) provider Mitel is making a splash with the first genuine hard-wiring of UC with VDI. The result is no less than a virtual desktop phone which not only becomes mobile, nevertheless can effectively be rerouted... to one of those mobile phones you've been reading about.

"If I'm in Las Vegas and my office extension is 1234, even so I have a remote office in Sydney, Australia, when I go to Sydney now, with the ability to virtualize voice on the desktop, I can now go log into my VMware View session and simultaneously log into the telephone in other words associated with me," explains Stephen Beamish, VP for marketing and business development for Mitel, in an interview with RWW from Dreamforce '11. "Right away this phone on this desk becomes 1234 as then."

One reason businesses have been investing in VMware View, contends Mitel, is for its inherent security. In this way the act of unifying View with Mitel UC, it goes on, puts desktop communications and collaboration within that rich security envelope.

World with a PC

"VMware sees a world with a PC and a mobile device, however no hard phone," explains Beamish, whose company's Communications Director software is designed for businesses that rely on hard phones and even PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange). "We understand that and we agree with that, yet we as well believe that there are individuals within a business that will after all require a hard phone. You have accountants, data entry people who have a phone beside them."The basic virtualization feature of Mitel UC Advanced would be geared toward that group, says Beamish. Nevertheless the all-virtualized, mobile-ready realm of VMware's typical clients will be addressed as so then, as the VP explains:

"You can now have on your PC or your laptop a soft phone, so there's no hard phone associated with it. And if you use Microsoft Lync, no one has been able to create a virtual soft phone because there's a lot of difficulty in scaling that to large enterprises. So they could get one or two, perhaps 10, customers that are virtual soft phones - fully integrated into Outlook or Notes, with your contacts and presence, showing that I'm on a phone call, not on a call, available. So say I'm going back to my office in Sydney. If I log into [Mitel UC Advanced], my soft phone will be there. Nevertheless now when someone calls 1234, it will simultaneously ring my soft phone and my mobile device."

With Mitel's Dynamic Extension feature enabled, one extension can be integrated into up to eight devices, including a user's home phone and mobile device - and this latter class is all-inclusive, enabling Android, iOS, and BlackBerry devices. Beamish says this all-inclusive element is part of his company's "Freedom Architecture," which he explained in this video from last November:

Mitel's licensing for UC Advanced is truly noteworthy. As Stephen Beamish tells RWW, users will already have purchased licenses for VMware vSphere 4. For UC Advanced, there will be a one-time perpetual per-user capital charge of $125 for a minimum of 50 users, with the option of redeploying an individual's license should he leave the company. The "sweet spot," Beamish adds, is businesses with 100 - 2,500 users.