NextPlane 'UC Exchange' Enables Companies to Build Real-Time Collaborative Business Communities across UC Platforms

Earlier this month, NextPlane announced UC Exchange, its next step in the development of real-time collaborative business communities for UC platforms. For the past two years, NextPlane had been providing a UC federation service called the NextPlane Federation Cloud service. UC Exchange is effectively the next generation, where significant new features have been added such as Directory Services and a federation management portal / provisioning workflow tool. In addition, NextPlane has increased federation to include UC to Social Media federation and some other features. The combination of Federation services, a central directory, and a portal – all combine to bring a community-based federation service to its customers.

Global enterprises in a number of industries, including manufacturing, automotive, energy, media, legal, education, pharmaceuticals and information technology, have joined UC Exchange to build real-time collaborative business communities with customers and partners around their UC platforms. UC Exchange currently has more than 100 (and growing) federation-ready organizations where companies can easily federate with customers and business colleagues in their partner ecosystems using a secure management portal.

UC Federation Services

UC Exchange federation services enables users on different platforms – in different organizations – to work together as if they were served by the same UC platform. They can share presence, exchange instant messages, participate in multi-party chat sessions, share files, and make voice and video calls. UC platforms covered are: Microsoft Lync, OCS 2007 R2, OCS 2007 and LCS 2005, IBM Sametime, Cisco Jabber XCP, Cisco WebEx Messenger, Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS) 8.0, Google Apps, Jive OpenFire, Isode, and eJabberd.

Key features of UC Exchange include:

Secure Management Portal – allows searching of the Members Directory for federation-ready partners, managing federation requests, and accessing usage reports. All Federation Requests and Tasks are tracked in a federation workflow process to simplify the process for business partners in setting up their federation. Usage reports provide useful insight into user adoption across the organization and their partner community.

Directory Services (Available December 2012) – provides a searchable "phone book" for "federation-ready" partners, with validated contact information based on employee profiles received from contributing members. UC Exchange Directory Search enables authorized end-users to search for the contact information of their colleagues in partner organizations directly from their UC clients without a need to install a plug-in. Users can search for colleagues by a combination of name, company, title, and/or location.

Microsoft Lync and OCS to Skype Federation – UC Exchange Skype Federation enables OCS or Lync end-users to call Skype users directly from their Microsoft clients, without having to install a plug-in on the client. To call a Skype user from a Lync or OCS client, a user can open a chat window with the UC Exchange Skype Federation app, type "Call" to set up the call, and then click the call button to make the actual voice call. Moreover, the Skype Federation app allows users to chat with IM while in a voice call.

Google to Skype Federation (Available December 2012) – enables end-users to call users on Skype from their Google client.

Voice Conferencing Federation – enables end-users on Microsoft Lync or OCS, to initiate conference calls and add colleagues on Google or vice versa.

UC to Social Media Federation – enables end-users of Yammer, Salesforce.com's Chatter, and Twitter to authenticate with their social media accounts and post to social media feeds, send private messages and participate in group discussions, all from their UC client. Effectively, NextPlane has created an application infrastructure that allows member companies to develop and deploy apps into UC Exchange that are relevant to a particular internal business process and make them available to themselves and federated business partners. There are currently APIs available to support this CEBP integration.

XMPP Group Chat Federation for Microsoft Lync and OCS – enables Lync and OCS end-users to add XMPP chat rooms as contacts to their contact list, and participate in group chat room discussions directly from their UC clients without a need for Microsoft Group Chat client and server infrastructure to be deployed.

Policy Enforcement – enables organizations to control which types of traffic (IM, presence, voice, video, and file transfer) are allowed or denied across any of the federated domains and/or users (internal and/or external) within their domains.

Security – Through secure-SIP federation traffic is encrypted end-to-end. UC Exchange also supports both XMMP over TLS and dial-back. All XMPP servers support dial-back security, and Jabber and OpenFire can be configured to use TLS as well. The combination of server dial-back and TLS provides both authentication and encryption for XMPP communication between UC Exchange and XMPP servers.

Two UC Exchange Membership Levels

Directory Membership – Free membership, giving member organizations access to the Management Portal, a listing in the Members Directory, the ability to search for Federation-Ready partners, the ability to accept inbound federation requests, free federation with Gmail.com, and basic usage reports.

Community Membership – Fee-based membership, which includes the ability to make directory-driven outbound UC to UC federation requests, user-level Directory Search, plus additional federation services such as federation with Skype, Social Media federation (Yammer, Twitter and Chatter) and XMPP Group Chat Federation. Community Members also receive additional benefits such as policy enforcement, advanced federation analytics and reporting, and 24/7 support with guaranteed service levels. Annual subscription fees for Community Membership are based on the number of users, domains, and federation features required.

What This Means to You

NextPlane's UC Exchange helps enterprises break down the communication barriers throughout their "value system," including the value chains of upstream suppliers and downstream channels and customers, by enabling interested parties to participate in secure, federated, and collaborative business communities. It’s about the community rather than about technical federation between two platforms. That technical piece is still required, but there’s a layer over the top which has been added consisting of Directory Services and the Management Portal which enables organizations to build and participate in real-time collaborative communities. Today, there are no true competitors to the NextPlane solution.

The removal of barriers to effective collaboration allows enterprises to:

• Achieve higher ROI on UC – maximizing external federation value by enabling users to collaborate in real time with users in external customers, partners and supplier organizations, regardless of their UC platform.
  
  
• Become part of a global UC "Clearing House" community or market-specific community – with a single federation connection, single point of management and policies.
  
  
• Leverage increased functionality over traditional on-premise gateways – such as custom presence (i.e., a mapping of presence states into a common format across disparate systems), multi-party chat, voice and video whilst reducing on-premise product and management costs.
  
  
• Support flexible UC deployments – NextPlane’s federation routing capabilities allow support for UC platform migration and co-existence while sharing the same domain name.