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As more businesses shift toward external IT, NextPlane recently reported substantial growth in adoption of its cloud-based federation services for unified communications (UC) – to the tune of over a quarter of a billion messages in one month.

In May, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said it connected a record number of businesses into its federated business communities through the NextPlane Federation Cloud service. NextPlane federated UC traffic exceeded a quarter of a billion messages during the month, illustrating the growing demand for federation between disparate UC platforms to allow for real-time, collaborative business communities using cloud computing, according to Farzin Shahidi, founder and CEO of NextPlane.

“Unified communications speeds time-to-market with real-time collaboration, and our cloud-based solution breaks down the interoperability barriers between UC platforms,” Shahidi said. “More businesses are realizing that building federated partner communities using presence, chat, voice and video has a competitive advantage and saves them time and money.”

NextPlane offers cloud-based presence, IM, multi-user chat, voice and video federation service. A cross-section of industries – including manufacturing, automotive, oil and gas, media, pharmaceuticals and financial services – are integrating the NextPlane Federation Cloud into their enterprise business strategy.

For the month of May 2012, company officials said NextPlane Federation Cloud service federated a total of: 1,090 unique domains, connecting more than 127,925 unique users, and more than 280 million IM, multi-user chat and presence messages transited the NextPlane service. Company officials said the numbers underscore the increase in demand for a collaborative business community, as more organizations move away from locked in siloed unified communications platforms.

The NextPlane Federation Cloud service provides the ability to federate with a broad reach of business partners, supporting all major UC platforms including Microsoft LCS, OCS, OCS R2 and Lync, Cisco Jabber XCP, CUPS and Webex Connect, IBM (News - Alert) Sametime, Google Apps, Jive OpenFire, ISODE M-Link and eJabberd.

Using unified communications saves workers 75 percent of the time they normally waste trying to track down associates and information, according to a recent study by Fonality (News - Alert). In addition, UC saves 50 percent of the time wasted trying to contact customers.

The same study indicates that if you calculate the value of unified communications for 50 workers, each earning an average salary of $40,000 per year, the savings in productivity would be $942,000 annually. When you calculate the value of those UC efficiencies by expanding collaboration with federation to business partners, the savings in time and money multiply exponentially, NextPlane officials said.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct 2-5, in Austin, TX. The Cloud Communications Expo will address the growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. For more information on registering for the Cloud Communications Expo click here.

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