The Providers of High-Quality Business Communications: Unified Office

We live in a real-time, hyper-connected push-button world today witnessed by the ubiquitous adoption of smartphones, search engines, and broadband. We don’t want to wait any longer than necessary and expect an immediate response when shopping for things. To help business to adapt to this new world, Unified Office came into being. Its main goal was to build a reliable, dependable, and flexible communications services provider that went to work on behalf of business.

Born in 2011, the company developed services to manage business-class communications while innovating additional value-added services that were fully extensible, highly configurable and armed with a feature set that would never be obsolete. The company has offices in Nashua, New Hampshire and Dallas, Texas.

In discussion with Raymond J. Pasquale, Founder, and CEO, Unified Office

Why did you start the company?

I saw an opportunity to reinvent the VoIP communications market. Lots of VoIP/UC companies came into being in the early 2000s by disrupting the pricing of the legacy PBX voice market. Price disruption came primarily from centralizing an IP enabled version of the old PBX called an IP PBX in the cloud that would handle hundreds of subscribers independent of location. There was an inherent lack of quality and reliability largely because the Internet was and is still not built for real-time applications like voice communications.

I wanted to reinvent this market much in the same way Steve Jobs reinvented the music player market back in 2001 with the introduction of the iPod and, of course, later the iPhone.

Discuss your first project and what you learned from it?

Our first project was basic VoIP and UC services. We invented a patented over the top transmission network layer called HQRP^TM for Highest Quality Routing Protocol^TM that eliminated the need for purchasing expensive premise-based telephone circuits such as T1 lines, while dramatically increasing the reliability and quality of service over a customer’s existing broadband Internet service.

Our very first deployment quickly taught us that in order to be successful at reinventing the communications industry we had to first invent a new way to use the Internet for our services that would be as reliable, if not more reliable than legacy PBX services. If we couldn’t do that then it would have made no sense to continue.

How challenging were your initial endeavors? How did you overcome these challenges?

The challenges were many but one of the biggest challenges was attempting to enter a legacy market and convince investors and customers that what we are offering is uniquely different from all the other products and services out there. It takes time, money, a willingness to adapt quickly, and sheer perseverance to succeed.

To turn every challenge into success, we are constantly looking for ways to innovate and are never satisfied with what we built yesterday. We are always looking ahead to identify those things what will make a material difference in the lives of our customers. That’s what it takes to build any successful company today.

Mention your products and services briefly.

Unified Office, Inc. is a leading managed service provider offering innovative business class communications technologies throughout many market verticals. We drive operational excellence for example in Business Communications, Internet of things (IoT), Data Analysis, and Intelligent Analytics. The vertical markets we are in range from verticals such as Restaurants, Hospitality, Healthcare, Service Businesses, Dental, Auto, and Agriculture to name just a few.

VoIP Business Solutions: We’ve integrated the most reliable open source VoIP and cloud innovations to deliver a feature-rich, device-agnostic business communication service to create the ultimate unified virtual office experience. It’s called Total Connect Now^SM.

Internet of Things (IoT) solutions: With the Total Connect Now^SM Operations Performance Suite (TCNOPS), businesses are now able to monitor and analyze IoT data such as refrigeration that is collected and sent over the Unified Office’s highly reliable VoIP transmission infrastructure in real time. The 2.0 version adds the ability to control environmental devices such as thermostats, air conditioners, refrigeration equipment. The service will take action based on trigger events generated from IoT data established by the user, as well as using predictive intelligence capabilities that report on potential problems before they occur.

How would you summarize the success of your company and its future prospects?

We are constantly innovating on behalf of our customers to help make their lives better. We invented our HQRP^TM transmission network for example to solve the reliability and quality issues that typically accompany VoIP. We created IoT services that ride on that same reliable network. We designed our own AI solution to detect sentiment in recorded calls. Because we have chosen to work with open source products and not reinvent the wheel each time we develop a new product or service, the sky is the limit for us. We spend our time developing pragmatic solutions that will positively impact our clients’ operations and more importantly their top and bottom line.

One of the latest additions to Unified Office’s award-winning product line is the Total Connect Now^SM Operations Performance Suite. It monitors environmental conditions like refrigeration and air conditioning, for example. Designed for companies of all sizes, it is the only product in the marketplace that is a pragmatic fully integrated IoT solution suite for our customers. Business owners and multi-location companies can view all of their businesses along with other analytics on a global basis with Unified Office’s web-based TCN Operations Management Suite (TCNOMS^SM). This is very important for companies in highly regulated industries such as Quick Serve Restaurants (QSRs) to help them stay in regulatory compliance with food safety standards.

Looking ahead I see us continuing to evolve and transform the communications marketplace helping businesses adapt to the speed of market changes that occur at a pace that is historically unprecedented.

Meet the Charismatic Leader

Raymond J. Pasquale, Founder, and CEO: Ray has more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneurial technology professional. He has extensive sales and customer engineering experience along with proven management team leadership in dynamic, emerging technology companies. Ray was a founding member of Sonus’ services organization, recruiting many of its most senior members. From 1996 until 1999 Ray was a key technical leader and sales consultant for Cascade Communications’ worldwide sales organization.

His background is in working with big infrastructure equipment providers who sold to communications service providers such as, Level 3, ATT, Sprint, etc.

“We are all on this planet for a short time. Make it count.”