Unison Technologies, with an assist from Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, says it is “launching a major threat to Microsoft Exchange.” Hmmm. The VAR Guy has heard similar grandstanding before from a range of companies. But Unison has caught our resident blogger’s attention a few times. Here’s why.
Unison ranks among the few unified communications companies that has embraced Ubuntu — Canonical’s fast-growing Linux distribution. In its latest attack against Microsoft, Unison is now launching a “free, sponsor-supported unified communications platform.”
Huh? Does that mean users will need to listen to commercials between phone calls? Actually, The VAR Guy has to concede: He’s not sure how the “free” offer works. Travel delays have prevented our resident blogger from speaking with Unison directly.
But here’s what The VAR Guy has heard so far:
- The new, sponsor-supported version of Unison can save a small business $100,000 versus a Microsoft solution, according to a Unison spokesman.
- Any organization can download the Linux and Windows-based software at www.unison.com, then deploy it without needing to buy licenses.
- Unison runs on-premise, on a Linux server behind the firewall, in contrast to “SaaS-only” hosted solutions like Google Apps
- Unison CEO Michael Choupak claims the solution offers the combined power of applications like Microsoft Exchange and a Cisco PBX. Hmmm. That’s another lofty claim. Unison, it seems, would prefer to rattle two IT giants for the price of one.
- The first Unison sponsors are Canonical and Intermedia, the New York-based hosted business applications provider.
- Unison combines e-mail, telephone, instant messaging, calendars and contacts into a single system, the company claims.
Of course, The VAR Guy does have to offer Microsoft and Cisco some equal time here. Scrappy start-ups have attempted to knock off Microsoft Exchange for more than a decade. But we’ve all seen the corporate email market share figures: Exchange still dominates. And companies that attempt to disrupt Cisco often short circuit somewhere along the way. Oh, and we all know how software companies that promote “free” solutions often struggle to generate profits.
Still, Unison is declaring war against the unified communications establishment. The VAR Guy will be watching to see if solutions providers join the cause.
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Rurik Bradbury of Unison Technologies here. I can confirm that we have no plans to put ads in phone calls, or to make Unison advertising too obtrusive. The ads come in the form of banners or contextual ads inside the Unison Desktop client and the Unison Server Control Panel. Also, all ads will be B2B and appropriate for an office environment.
A major goal of ours is to make sure that VARs are comfortable deploying Unison for their clients (instead of very expensive solutions like Exchange). So all ads will be non-intrusive and acceptable within a business environment.
More info about the sponsor-supported version is now on the Unison site.
Hey, I just tried the link and I get the following:
Thank you for your interest in Unison. However, we have detected that you are located in one of the following countries or US states, where the use or sale of Unison software is prohibited:
Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and any other jurisdiction to which US companies are restricted from exporting software.
If you are not in one of the territories above or believe this page to be an error, please e-mail us at info@unison.com
Jim: The VAR Guy will dig a little deeper to see what’s behind the message.
Ubuntu and Canonical are full of grandstand announcements and statements, as many Linux desktop people and companies have been since the turn of the century, but they have no idea what’s required, where they want to get to or how to get there even if they did.
There are many groupware solutions, some quite good, in the open source world that could have been made into something extremely credible if Linux companies had picked them up and ran with them against Exchange. Novell was one I would have thought would have been desperate to get something widely used to halt Exchange’s advance, but alas, they are content to see Groupwise be run into the ground. Unfortunately, a good open source groupware system means a good open source LDAP and single sign-on infrastructure, as well as good open source graphical tools to manage it which people now demand having seen Exchange. The latter is probably why Red Hat doesn’t have anything in that area.
As for the sponsor supported communications platform. Piffle. It’s not unlike how many Linux desktop companies set up out of VC funding said they would support themselves. Nothing happened.
I can confirm what commenter #1 said about the strange error message. I turned on TOR and went to the Unison site, and got the same message.
If you go to the following link, you can see the text for yourself. It is a 403, which in http server response talk means the server says you don’t have permission to access it.
http://www.unison.com/errors/403.html
My guess based upon the very little info we have is that it has something to do with the export of encryption software (which would make sense, as it is communication software, which should use encryption).
Two things spring to mind here. Cisco is it’s self about to disrupt the whole corporate software platform with it’s plans to turn routers into application servers using it’s own bespoke version of Linux. At the moment they are offering bounties to software developers to provide software solutions to problems like say an answer to Microsoft Exchange. So Unison don’t need to make a profit from their attempt directly.
If Unison adapt their software to work with Ciscos new platform then they can claim the bounty. And given that Cisco are themselves attempting to disrupt Microsofts hold on the enterprise market they might even turn around and give Unison a helping hand.
Here’s some second-day perspective on Unison from ChannelWeb.