I once worked for a guy who used to say that when a salesperson or an engineer showed him something, and it got him really excited, that it “pulled his socks down.” From a casual search of the Internet, it doesn’t appear that this one-liner was a real thing, but I surely knew what he meant when he said it.
It’s not often that a product “pulls my socks down,” especially given the landscape of software-as-a-service always having some really cool features, some things that are just alright, and some things that make you wonder “what were they thinking?”
That’s what happened a few days ago when I was speaking to an old friend, who admittedly is a sales critter by trade, gave me a demo of the NEC Univerge Blue UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) platform.
A little background, for those of you who don’t know me well: I’ve been working on NEC phone systems, and their predecessor phone systems, since the early 2000s. When the DSX first came out in 2007, I loved this thing. I installed these phone systems anywhere I could: they were easy to mount, easy to install, easy to program, just overall a convenient way to make a buck. After that, the SL1100 and SL2100 have come out, and they’re great appliances too - they added great features and functionality for on-premises phone systems, but they’re just that: on-premises phone systems.
If COVID-19 taught us nothing, it’s that work has become less of a place, and more of an activity. For some people, the activity of work has to occur in a workplace, and that’s fine. But for a lot of folks, working from home has become a normal activity, and the onsite phone system is an after thought. This has rendered a lot of the old-school phone system manufacturers irrelevant, and rendered a business that I found really fun in the early 2000s obsolete.
As I mentioned in a prior post, a lot of VoIP phone systems have softphones for mobile devices. Heck, even the SL-series has them. But they’re usually just okay at best.
In fact, since I started using the 3CX Phone System, which I absolutely love, I’m wondering if NEC was going to come out with something to make themselves relevant again. In fact, they came out with an initial Univerge Blue offering, and it was weak. It was basically one of their Univerge 3C phone systems in the cloud. But as you surely know, there’s no shortage of cloud phone systems for business. I’m sure you can think of a few of those providers right now. They’re a dime a dozen.
But when this friend showed me the one piece of software he had on his desktop that did everything, it was pure magic to me:
- Business phone calling
- Internal workforce instant messaging
- Video conferencing
- Audio conferencing
- Visual voice mail with audio transcription
- Text messaging from your work phone number (wait, what?!?)
So, for me, this would replace a combination of tools:
- My desktop softphone (phone calling, voice mail)
- Microsoft Teams (instant messaging, audio and video conferencing)
- Google Voice (text messaging from my desktop, but a different number than my office number)
The especially nice thing, though, is that it’s easy for people who are on existing UCaaS offerings to make the switch over to Univerge Blue. In addition to supporting their own VoIP phones, they support a lot of the major brands out there (Yealink, Grandstream, Polycom, etc.)
There are a ton more features for larger customers and niche use cases, but the fact that everything just works is the part that gets me.
I’m excited to try this out for our internal environment, and I’m curious to see how well it works for us. This truly seems like the thing to bring me back into the fold with NEC, and I couldn’t be more excited for it.