“In promoting (our services) to our customers, including our customer base in Canada, we’re finding that more of our customers are requiring and looking to us to provide a more complete solution which includes unified communications,” said Dal Vandervort, federal sales director at Westlake, Ohio-based Onix.
Since 2008, Canadian tech company Esna Technologies Inc. has been using its unified communications technology with Google Apps in the cloud. Serendipitously, Onix stumbled across the Canadian tech vendors through a combination of market buzz and its own customers. Using Esna Tech, companies take their exisiting in-office voice and video infrastructure and merge it with cloud solutions to take it everywhere.
Davide Petramala, vice-president of marketing and business development at Esna Tech, said its software brings on-premise office services to all forms of the cloud. “When (businesses) move to the cloud,” he said, “how do they make their public cloud applications work with on-prem? We’re an application layer that sits on the customer’s network, connects to the existing voice network and integrates it securely into the public cloud.”
Vandervort said that Onix already helped take business infrastructure into the cloud, but needed Esna for its expertise in folding in office resources. “If you’re on the road and using your laptop, and you’re … looking at data and collaborating with others … you still come back to your office and have messages on your desk phone,” he said. “Well, why not take that information, those messages on your desk phone, and make them accessible on your handheld, your smart phone or wherever else? That’s what Esna does. It kind of brings all that together and makes it easier to access.”
Petramala said that was the genesis of the partnership between Onix and Esna, allowing Onix to offer Esna’s services its existing customer base. “Our technology is about enabling hybrid organizations, and one of the key drivers for Onix in leveraging our product is (that) 99 per cent of their customers have on-premise voice infrastructure phone systems,” he said.
Vandervort said that instead of buying a technology with identical functionality, Onix recognized that Esna was already doing this well, and preferred to integrate its service. “It’s a perfect fit for Esna to come in and allow accessibility with your phone systems, your computers, all the data, the back-end resources,” he said.
Petramala said that this is a growing trend among a lot of up-and-coming mid-size companies. Instead of investing in just one platform, because of budget constraints and savvy IT teams, more and more businesses are opting for best-of-breed technologies. “If a customer is willing to go to Apps, they’ve already embraced the cloud. But how do I make the cloud work with that organization?”
And that fits with what Vandervort calls, “the premise of cloud.”