Google May Unite Gmail and Google Talk using GrandCentral services
Google’s buy of the small Unified Communications (UC) tech company GrandCentral is a sign that voice communications will soon become a big part of Gmail. The deal was announced yesterday.
In a nutshell, GrandCentral is a service that lets you integrate all of your various phone numbers (home, work, cell) and voice mailboxes into one central account with one phone number. You access this account either via a Web interface or with any phone. All of your voicemails are there, and you can either listen to them or read them, or forward them to someone else.
There’s also a neat call management element. GrandCentral allows you to train it to act like your personal secretary, to handle calls from various users based on instructions you’ve given it. You can label certain numbers as SPAM, for instance, or tell the system to route certain numbers to your cell phone only.
Google could build the unified communications and call-handling functionality of GrandCentral into its existing voice (and IM) product Google Talk. That would certainly be an improvement of Google Talk. Google could also build GrandCentral into Gmail, as most analysts are predicting today. I think it’s both — Grand Central will be used as the glue that finally bonds Gmail and GTalk together.
With the voice and IM from GTalk, unified communications and call-handling intelligence from GrandCentral built into Gmail, Gmail becomes a fairly robust unified communications app. It begins to look and act like the Live Communications Server platform that Microsoft is building with Nortel for enterprises.
Users could manage and communicate with their buddies/contacts from one interface. Phone contact lists would be merged with e-mail contact lists. Instructions could given on how to handle calls from certain phone numbers in the same e-mail apps are given rules for handling mail from certain e-mail addresses.
Demand for the unification of voicemail and email began in large enterprises and is now slowly spreading to consumers. Google might be one of the few companies with the design chops to bring all that functionality together in a way that is intuitive and easy to use.
Source:PC World News