Katie: Welcome back to the BusinessMakers Overtime Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com/overtime. If you are hearing the crazy fireworks and cheering in the background it is because we are still celebrating our 50th show.

Esther: We are.

Katie: And what better way to celebrate than listening in on a fantastic interview that Russ Capper did with Joe Schurman, founder and CEO of Evangelized Communications.

Russ: Well let's start by you telling us about Evangelized Communications.

Joe: Well, EC is my first venture in creating an organization. I started off with kind of a gaggle of friends to put together something that we thought would be very innovative in the unified communications industry. So we started by designing and implementing technology that really sat on top of Microsoft's unified communications platform. By doing so we quickly became recognized by delivering very quick software to the Microsoft partner, I guess arena as well as also to I guess every industry from a unified communications perspective. So our solutions early on were utility based. Then we saw the success really grow on quickly and we decided to really invest in the company and really take this to the next level. Through some seed funding, as well as finding some really good additional resources to add to EC, we've developed some of the most innovative line of business software that's been released so far in this community.

Russ: Well tell us what unified communications means.

Joe: How long is our show? Let's look at this from the consumer's standpoint. If you've got wife and kids or family or friends, you're probably on Facebook, right. So you've got Facebook types of communication or e-mail, chat if you're online.

Russ: You bet.

Joe: Posting back and forth on a wall. You've got a home phone maybe. You probably don't 'cause everyone's switching over to mobile phones -

Russ: Right; that's true.

Joe: You might have a home phone. You definitely have a mobile phone.

Russ: Right.

Joe: Some people are even getting into sit based communications, meaning Skype or Vonage or something like that -

Russ: Right; that's for sure.

Joe: So what happens if you miss a call at home? What happens if you miss a call on your mobile? What happens if you miss a call on your Skype phone? What happens if you miss a chat in Facebook? Is there any way to unify all those into one place. That's what unified communications is. So if you think about this from an enterprise standpoint, organizations have Microsoft Exchange or Outlook or they've got an Avia's solution or Cisco solution or any type of existing communications infrastructure that's out there.

Russ: Right.

Joe: We all have mobile phones, right?

Russ: Right; absolutely.

Joe: So how do we unify all these modalities of communication? Well that's what unified communications is. It's taking your inbox and allowing your inbox to receive not only e-mail now, but also missed call notifications or missed chat notifications. If you're on the road or you're mobile, if you receive a call coming into your enterprise voice phone number, like your office line if you will, that phone will actually ring your desktop and your mobile device. If you miss the phone call on your mobile device it sends the user back to your voicemail and allows that voicemail to be sent to you back via e-mail along with a preview of that actual voicemail. So you can quickly now navigate through all these different modalities.

Russ: It clearly sounds complicated.

Joe: It is.

Russ: But that might be why there's lots of opportunity there as well.

Joe: Absolutely.

Russ: Now do you already have unified communications products that you're installing?

Joe: Yeah; so we basically take the unified communications foundation and apply that towards line of business use. So the only organization that's out there or manufacturer that's out there today that provides that capability for developers like me and my company is Microsoft. So Microsoft has a UC platform that allows us to actually extract all those different types of modalities, phone e-mail, instant messaging, video, telepresence, and build applications that you would use in health care, higher education, general consumer based use via the web; those types of solutions. That's what we build. So we've built several solutions like that so far, one of which was actually acquired by a Fortune 500 company just this year.

Russ: So a product that your company, Evangelized Communications, built since its two year inception, it's already been bought.

Joe: Yes.

Russ: That's pretty cool.

Joe: We're very excited.

Russ: Now back to the big picture now. There have been pieces of this developed by others than Microsoft, right? I remember having a telephony product that integrated the office phone system with e-mail and the network quite successfully. I've heard about these sort of follow me programs that you have a number. Are those competitive products to unified communications or are they subsets to it?

Joe: Absolutely competitive. It's been more of an evolution than anything. That's the best way to describe this. Telephony is not a new technology or new industry. So we're talking about 50 to 100 years, plus old types of organizations. Cisco's been around for a long time. So has Avaya. Even Nortel that was recently acquired by Avaya. All these organizations provided a company with a PBX, a private branch exchange phone system, PBX phones which you would see in a normal office space location where you down line and dial the number out and a series of connections to the local PSTN network, AT&T or Sprint. So now those companies that are traditional telephony companies have added what's called an IP layer to those environments. What I mean by that is you can now access all those types of technology via the web or via a configured based platform, a UC platform. Avaya's done the same with theirs and Nortel did the same with theirs; Cisco's done the same with theirs. The difference between what Microsoft does than these types of organizations is they developed it from a software approach versus taking it from a hardware approach and then slapping a software layer on top of it.

Russ: Doesn't there seem that there might be an opportunity for a simplification, even just on the hardware side -

Joe: Absolutely.

Russ: And particularly like your iPad here or the way mobile phones are just taking over and becoming very smart and sophisticated. Isn't there a chance that everybody, regardless if you're just a home user or if you're in a commercial application in the enterprise, everybody has their own individual device and that's the way we connect instead of trying to pull all these disparate systems into one package -

Joe: You nailed it. I think really my vision of this in the future I think is that we won't have an iPad or an HP device or a certain manufacturer's based platform. We're gonna have a slate. You'll get your cut of that slate. You'll design your own device that fits your everyday needs, whether that's something that fits in your coat pocket or your side pocket or something that you can hold like an iPad. It's completely operating system, internet browser ubiquitous. Then from that slate device you'll be able to connect all these different modalities of communication. I'm sure you'll have a choice of those providers like you do today with AT&T and Sprint and others. So I think that's the future. Right now it is still complex and it's tied together by applications and gateways.

Russ: A are there specific products that you're developing right this minute with Evangelized Communications?

Joe: Oh yeah. There's some really cool stuff.

Russ: Can you give us a preview of a couple of them?

Joe: So I talked about my passion for being able to help organizations communicate more effectively, right. But my focus right now is helping specific industries do that. Namely, higher education and health care. So we have a product coming out that's called UC University that allows individuals like you and I to take a class from any university anywhere in the world and being able to do so via live HD video. So you could actually see the professor, be able to participate with other colleagues or students inside that classroom environment and take the class from the comfort of your home.

Russ: What's the status of that product?

Joe: We're gonna launch it at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in July.

Russ: Do you have any hot prospects yet or is it too early for that?

Joe: Absolutely. Yeah; we're actually working with several universities.

Russ: Okay; and the health care product.

Joe: That's the most passionate product that I've been focused on right now. It's called Smart Care. It's in development. We don't have a production release date yet for it. We're hoping to get it out this year. There's a lot of politics involved obviously in the health care industry. So just down side of getting the product ready we have to get it out there. Basically the need for this product came from witnessing my grandfather who's a quadriplegic not receive the type of care that he should be receiving based on the ability to communicate between physicians today. He's a quadriplegic so he receives these colonized diseases that are just due to the blood flow pressure that he has. So he literally had to fly from Canada to Dallas to see a doctor. I just did not understand that at all. So we're developing solutions that run on an HP slate device or an iPad that allow a home care or critical care type patient or immobile patient to be able to interface via HD conferencing with their medical record with the physician and allow that physician to interact with other physicians.

Russ: That's cool.

Joe: On that same record.

Russ: That's real cool.

Joe: That's changing life changing technology.

Russ: Absolutely.

Joe: So I'm hoping any hospital that's out there can understand this and understand the passion behind getting it out there.

Russ: That's cool. Sounds like you're changing an industry there, too.

Joe: Hopefully.

Esther: Well that was a pretty cool interview.

Katie: It really was.

Esther: I hope things continue to go that way and it looks like they are doing incredible things, something different from an agency type organization.

Katie: Exactly. Good stuff.

Esther: Yeah. Well we have a real exciting chapter three coming up, we are going to be hearing from a couple of people that we polled to see what they would tell their 20 year old self if they could go back in time. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Overtime Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com I'm Esther Steinfeld.

Katie: And I'm Katie Laird.

Esther: We will be back with chapeter 3.