Business ISP and managed service provider Lumison is to sell unified communications as a managed service, targeting small and medium sized businesses that do not have sufficient technical skills or deep enough pockets to install and deploy on-premise Microsoft Office Communication Server.

The unified communications offer is an extension of the company’s existing managed service, which is delivered by carving out individual customer-specific private virtual clouds to pipe Microsoft Exchange on-demand to SMBs.

Other Microsoft applications such as Dynamic CRM and Sharepoint will eventually be delivered in the same manner.

“Each client has their own instance in a secure cloud and which is fully hosted but is customisable,” Aydin Kurt-Elli, CEO of Lumison explained. “The way we deploy services means we can integrate mail or comms services in with existing applications that are being used on-site and also integrate with a customer’s existing Active Directory infrastructure, which is a capability that is pretty unusual for an external service provider.”

The OCS offer is one of a fully hosted pure IP communications service that can be fully integrated with the office infrastructure to provide a desktop experience which is seamless from email and IM to presence and conferencing. “It is service that offers seamless click through, and is not a bolt-on.”

The UK company has since 1995 provided ADSL and SDSL broadband, secure virtual hosting, server hosting, VOIP offerings and co-location services out of its data centres in London and Edinburgh. 

Kurt-Elli told us, “We have been thinking through our business strategy and looking at ways we could adopt highly efficient technologies like cloud and virtualisation for customers in ways that would not cannibalise our existing hosting business. Cloud is encroaching on the managed services sector, and there are some big players entering the market, so we have made the conscious decision to move away from the commodity end of managed hosting. We will concentrate on developing services for secure private clouds, and we will standardise on the use of Microsoft Hyper V virtualisation platform in order to maximise efficiency in the data centre.”

He suggested the cost to deploy OCS can be reduced considerably as a result. Typically, a system that might be deployed across six physical servers could be run on an infrastructure footprint that extends over four virtual machine servers. 

It means the service can be delivered cost-effectively to customers wanting as few as 20 OCS seats. “Any site with 15 seats onwards would benefit in taking the OCS managed service,” Kurt-Elli said.

He suggested that the average cost of an Exchange seat delivered by Lumison as a managed service runs from £6 to £12 per seat a month, and that the new OCS service will likely settle at a similar price point.

The company will be using BT’s 21 CN IP exchange to ensure a seamless IP voice experience in the managed UC services that are launched today.

The managed service model also provides improved business continuity assurance for businesses that no longer want to manage multiple supplier relationships or network and hardware uptime themselves.

Lumison believes there is a gaping inefficiency in the communications strategy of many organisations, particularly small and mid-sized businesses. 

Although they can come to rely on real-time communications to drive their business, they are gambling on antiquated technologies that are not able to get the most out of new IP-based landline, mobile, email, IM and video communications options.