"The communications sector is an exciting and dynamic place to be and the accelerating convergence we are seeing means that we need new tools and platforms to monitor and cope with the change," said Unison's MD, Sven Vosse.
The pace of change in the sector, the acceleration of mobility, the arrival of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) market and the increasing bandwidth has meant that the change has outstripped most businesses ability to cope with it.
The technology advancements and, more importantly, the behavioural shifts, have outpaced the business processes in most companies to monitor, manage and control these shifts. The new platform allows for full control and management of communications usage within the business, including data, by users from a number of different platforms, devices and in a number of different formats.
"Unison is already the market leader in the Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) sector in Africa with over 2.5 million handsets under management. This move will enable us to shift and adapt to the new market," said Unison's strategic business development director, Keith Jones.
The move has been 18 months in the making and has involved a redevelopment of the core platform and the writing of a different number of complementary modules. The Unison services offering has been expanded accordingly, to ensure that customers get full value from their communications platforms and providers.
The new platform will allow for both on-site and hosted deployments. The first and most important module, Unison Mobile, is being launched on 28 June, with subsequent product launches throughout the rest of the calendar year.
Jones said that the majority of the new platform will be released before the end of the year. "The new modules will encompass business intelligence, email, productivity, fax and a full directory management.
"We believe that the platform is the first of its kind to market in this region and will position us very strongly against the global players to support our expansion plans into other markets, such as the Nordics and the UK," Jones concluded.
For more information, go to www.unison.co.za.
