Innovator of the Week – Where Are They Now?
Ray Pasquale
Founder and CEO of Unified Office
Unified Office – A Rapidly Growing New Hampshire Success Story
Unified Office began a few years ago after the recession at an incubator in Portsmouth, NH. We started with a few seasoned entrepreneurs working to reinvent VoIP communications in a landscape that was dominated by companies that were low in quality and low in reliability. We embraced the best of open source techniques that virtually guarantees that features and functions are never obsolete. The company has since tripled in size with our headquarters in Nashua, NH and is now deployed in hundreds of businesses across the country comprised of thousands of users.
We offer business communications, business intelligence analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT). We focus on Small to Medium Businesses (SMB) across the United States. We help the Quick Serve Restaurant (QSR) vertical for example cope with hyper connected impatient consumers that in return creates additional economic benefits for our customers such as increased revenue and profitability. QSRs live in a highly regulated world. Our IoT solution for example allows them to track refrigeration and prep table temperatures among other things that are crucial for them to maintain food safety compliance and possible food inventory waste. The reliable delivery of business critical information that machines have to convey is just as important as the reliable delivery of voice communications.
In New Hampshire our customers range from property management to chambers of commerce to nursing homes. Our communications services, analytics and IoT solutions can be applied across a wide variety of market verticals that were previously available to only that of the largest of enterprises.
Pizza 911 and Checkmate Pizza are a growing independent QSR chain based in Manchester, Concord, Londonderry and Goffstown, NH. We deployed our business communications service and real-time analytics in each store. When implemented, Unified Office increased their revenues dramatically causing them to double their staff. Read more about the Pizza 911 story here.
The challenge in today’s market is really not about technology. We are undergoing a cultural revolution in how consumers and businesses purchase goods and services. Technology is merely a tool that helps them adapt to these fundamental market forces. Unified Office is able to help businesses of all types adapt. It’s not about a one size fits all solution. Technologies need to adapt to suit the needs of businesses and consumers and not the other way around.
We are living in a time where current voice communications providers are becoming legacy much like the mini computer industry was disrupted by the PC years ago. We are in the early innings of similar disruption. It will be companies like ours that will help businesses adapt and offer real flexible solutions that will solve compelling problems and generate additional revenue.
Unified Office has many opportunities for continued market growth. Our real-time analytics and business intelligence platform will continue to evolve as well and incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques.
Ray Pasquale – Bio
Ray spent the last 20 years as an entrepreneurial technology professional with extensive sales and customer engineering experience as well as holding various executive positions within high growth technology companies. These companies were significant participants in building out the core of the Internet in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s. Ray was an early member of Sonus Networks(SONS) for example and helped found its worldwide professional services practice in addition to performing pre-sales business development functions. Prior to Sonus, Ray was a key technical leader and sales consultant for Cascade Communications’ worldwide sales organization. During his tenure, Cascade was purchased by Ascend Communications. Ascend, a leader in remote access technologies for the Internet market, was subsequently absorbed by Lucent in a merger in 1998.
Check out Unified Office’s original Innovator of the Week profile here.