Unified Communications

Avaya, one of the leading phone system providers and BT are looking at a more profound partnership in unified communications and voice technologies. The companies have worked together for around ten years.

A new announcement has just revealed that Avaya and BT have extended their partnership for a further three years in order to exploit the growing unified communications market. Neil Sutton of BT Global Services said;

“Our ongoing relationship with Avaya helps us to further grow and innovate our portfolio of networked IT services, giving us the ability to deliver solutions to our customers on the vendor platforms most suited to their business.”

Avaya, a popular phone system provider has teamed up with HP to work on a collaborative unified communications offering. Under a three year contract, HP will offer bundled unified communications solutions that contain both HP and Avaya products. The project will mainly use hardware and software from Avaya and HP will be providing its unified communications consulting and management services.

According to the two telecoms companies, this new unified communications offering will enable companies to become more cost-efficient and to secure scalable, interoperable solutions.

Yesterday a new alliance was launched, aiming to manage interoperability between unified communication (UC) systems. Launched by Juniper Networks, Polycom, Microsoft, Logitech and HP, the new group is called the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF).

Unified communications giant Cisco was notably absent from the list of companies founding the organisation. However, we have been assured by the UCIF spokesperson that both Cisco and Avaya have been invited into the group but as both are large companies, it may take some time to get an answer. The groups’ main aim is to provide consistency across the different UC devices and platforms.

A new survey by Vanson Bourne on behalf of telecoms company Interactive Intelligence, has shown that half of large businesses have the infrastructure necessary to support remote and flexible working and actively encourage it. 35% of respondent businesses use unified communications as a means to support flexible working and home workers, however, a disappointing 18% are thinking of moving over to unified communication solutions.

Rather worryingly, the survey hinted at a decline in the uptake of IT systems. Top analyst Gartner believes that by 2012, a fifth of businesses will have no IT assets – just hosted IT. This survey seems to support that theory. Mind you, flexible working and remote working aren’t too bad as the compensations of such a scenario.

TUI Travel, the travel agent giant based in the UK, has just given a five year contract worth approximately £88.2 million to Deutsche Telekom. Or to be more exact, T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom and not to be confused with T-Mobile, the mobile phone division.

T-Systems has been commissioned to provide a unified communication solution for TUI Travel which is comprised of First Choice and Thomson. The unified communications system will require T-Systems to handle end-to-end systems, integrating data, voice and mobile services. TUI Travel has over 25,000 staff across thousands of travel agencies, so a UC solution would certainly help make things more efficient!

Recent research has shown that a lot of companies are going about Unified Communications (UC) in the wrong way. When you take into account the condition of the economy, it’s easy to see why businesses are approaching UC in a piecemeal way and bolting on bit after bit, but this is not the way to unify your communications.

The trick is in the name – Unified. Using a fragmented system of communication makes things harder and not easier. The benefit of UC lies in the efficiency of having all your communication systems as one making it cheaper and easier to manage. So if you’re considering UC, make sure you do it right!

Unified Communications (UC) is a growing industry in South Asia and the Middle East. Due to the recent economic downturn plus the growth of multiple office locations, solutions such as UC, conferencing and UC bundling are becoming more popular.

India it seems is the largest buyer of UC solutions according to new reports by Frost and Sullivan. The report also found that the Sri Lankan market is turning towards IP telephony, more so than traditional telephony. The growth rates, according to Frost and Sullivan, should carry on well into 2015.

Polycom and Avaya are to expand their relationship and develop collaboration, video and voice products to bring to the business market. The Unified Communications (UC) products and services that the two companies will develop will be based around the Avaya Aura SIP platform and the Polycom Open Collaboration Network strategy for maximum effect.

By combining Avaya’s collaboration expertise and Polycom’s video and voice innovations, businesses are in for a good time in the next few months!