Circuit, formerly known as Project Ansible, expands Unify’s telephony and UC footprint into enterprise social collaboration. Can it compete with heavyweights like Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce.com?
Unify on Oct. 28 launched Circuit, its cloud-based social-business collaboration tool, which had been known as Project Ansible. Along with a number of other industry analysts and consultants, I got to hear about and work with the product at conference in October, hosted by the company in Scottsdale, Ariz. The company also celebrated the first anniversary of its rebranding from Siemens Enterprise Communications to Unify.
With Circuit, Unify is clearly stepping out of its comfort zone of PBX and unified collaboration systems (OpenScape Business, OpenScape 4000, OpenScape Enterprise, and OpenScape Enterprise Express). The product concept and direction was initially announced at an event in Denver in June 2013, and Unify demonstrated an early version at Enterprise Connect last March. A number of people who participated in October’s launch conference commented that it didn’t seem to have advanced very far since then.
