Unleashed Skype for Business

Foreword

When I work with customers, I find it’s sometimes useful to put the current set of technology into a bit of a historical context—essentially how the solutions they are evaluating fit into a long-term timeline. There are a bunch of ways to look at the evolution of the business communications industry, and this model I’ve just found to be moderately helpful.

One can think of the first generation of business communications to be all about the on-premises circuit-switched PBX. This really started with the advent of deregulation, where it was now permitted to attach third-party equipment to the public network, and companies wanted a piece of that in their own environment. This was a big step—the birth of the heterogeneous network—and in many ...