According to Gartner's Article: Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2007 [1], Unified Communications (UC) offer the ability to significantly improve the way in which individuals, groups and companies interact and play, consolidating technologies such as voice-over-IP, presence, e-mail, audio and videoconferencing, voice mail and instant messaging.

A key feature of the UC is that it offers the possibility to integrate communications with business applications. Gartner called this capacity "business processes enabled for communications".  [+]See more...

Antartec has presented a solution using Open Source products, in order to provide the benefits that the Unified Communications brings.

The combination of Asterisk VoIP server with Zimbra collaboration server, and Jabber instant messaging server provide approximately 80% of the services involved in the concept of Unified Communications.

	Asterisk:  offers Voice-over-IP and voice mail.
	Zimbra:  offers E-mail and Contact Management.
	Jabber: offers Instant Messaging with presence detection.

The combination of these elements provides businesses in the SME field the opportunity to reduce the technological gap at the communication level between bigger competitors and them.