Today's organizations must contend with increasingly complex communications environments that feature a wide array of communications methods. Employees, business partners, and customers communicate with one another through infinite combinations of phones, voice messaging, e-mail, fax, mobile clients, and rich-media conferencing.

Too often, however, these tools are not used as effectively as they could be. The result is information overload and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down processes, and reduce productivity.

IP telephony and IP communications solutions have proven their ability to help organizations solve such problems, enabling them to streamline business processes and reduce costs. For years, companies of all sizes have been realizing the benefits that carrying voice, data, and video communications across a common, IP infrastructure can bring.

More recently, however, IP telephony and IP communications have evolved into unified communications solutions that offer benefits that are greater than ever. Instead of simply connecting products, unified communications applications integrated within an IP network provide structure and intelligence that helps organizations integrate their communications more closely with business processes, and ensure information reaches recipients quickly, through the most appropriate medium.

Businesses can collaborate in real time using advanced applications from an integrated, easy-to-use interface. These applications include: