Unity is a unified communications platform which consists of highly customizable software applications and frameworks.  Unity was engineered for over a decade using a unique and highly disciplined evolutionary software design approach.  The result is a mature and highly modular communications platform that can be rapidly modified in a manner that other technologies cannot.   This makes Unity a strong platform for delivering communications solutions for vertical and horizontal applications across diverse market spaces.

Horizontal Applications

Many generic conferencing systems currently exist within the horizontal business and consumer markets.  Unity's full complement of features is highly competitive with the top market leaders.  However, Unity stands out from market leaders in many ways:

1. 1)Ease of use - Exceptional user interface and consistent work flow
   

2. 2)Moderation - Powerful moderation and policy control that allows moderation of all aspects of a conference
   

3. 3)Reliability - The ability to automatically run on networks that other solutions cannot without network administration
   

4. 4)Flexibility - The ability to deploy peer-to-peer systems, server hosted systems, or hybrid systems
   

5. 5)Extensibility - The ability to rapidly build new variations of product as well as quickly extend existing capabilities
   

6. 6)Performance - Unity leverages the full graphics and CPU bandwidth of all client endpoints for a truly distributed collaborative experience
   

Vertical Adaptability

Unity was designed to be highly extensible and promote the rapid evolution of communication protocols, distributed processes, and user interfaces.  One of Unity's unique strengths is its ability to be reconfigured to meet the demands of vertical applications, particularly where one-size-fits-all solutions are highly ineffective.  Unity makes it possible to efficiently develop product variations that meet new and evolving business requirements.  This allows the rapid development of products that can effectively capture emerging business opportunities.

Portability

Unity was developed specifically to have little reliance on any host operating system.  This makes the technology extremely portable and self reliant.  Unity applications and their underlying frameworks currently run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X.  The underlying framework has a unique software driver architecture that significantly reduces the time required to port the technology to additional platforms.

Security

All communications within Unity use TLS/SSL strength encryption and security.  This ensures the privacy of all information exchanged between clients and servers.  The system uses 1024-bit RSA, 128-bit or greater AES encryption with cypher-block chaining, as well as a certificate authority for RSA public key verification.

Scalability

Unity has a flexible server architecture that allows it to scale to support large communities of users.  The number of multicast servers used to support a community can be increased to accommodate larger conferencing loads.  The amount of server bandwidth necessary for a community of users depends on many factors, but must reflect the business model for a particular deployment.  Peer-to-peer conferencing can reduce the need for multicast servers and reduce hosting costs, but this creates variable quality-of-service which is not deemed acceptable in many professional settings.

Flexibility

Unity is built on a powerful signaling abstraction which makes the network transparent when development communication services.  This allows the design of services to focus solely on a clean object and signaling model and its associated user interface. Unity utilizes a unique datagram protocol and network topology.  This allows an unlimited number of communications services to share their various protocols over a single client/server connection allowing for a simple and reliable network topology.  Hashing is used throughout the system to ensure high efficiency and scalability of complex signaling transactions.

Services

Unity is an extensible set of services that can be combined together in numerous ways to build different types of solutions.  This makes it easy to combine services that have an appeal to specific market segments.  The following sections describe the key services in Unity.  All of these services are fully demonstrated by the Unity software application and are described in more detail in the following links: