As many organisations continue to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, more and more solutions are appearing on the market to help them along in their transitions.  

Although helpful, the sheer volume of these new and often disparate solutions can cause a headache for IT managers trying to discern which best fits their unified communications (UC) requirements. The relief for that headache may come in the form of NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE offering. 

UNIVERGE BLUE was launched in the US last year and was rolled out across the UK and EMEA this summer. It offers users fully integrated conferencing, collaboration, screen sharing, video conferencing, back up, file synching, and contact centre capabilities available from desktop or mobile devices.  

By having a wide range of cloud services on the same platform it reduces IT administration and TCO compared to having multiple, disjointed applications, according to Andrew Cooper, NEC’s UK & Ireland Sales Director. 

“For many businesses, they rely on their phone system – such as NEC, Avaya, Cisco or Mitel – for their core telephony and then they would add applications. If they wanted meetings or video conferencing they might overlay with Zoom, WebEx or Teams,” he told UC Today. 

“If they wanted to add contact centre to that, they’d have to overlay another platform, and if they wanted documents storage, security and chat those add more layers of complexity. UNIVERGE BLUE completely simplifies that. We offer all of that under one complete UC platform, and at one low monthly rate.” 

UNIVERGE BLUE can work either as a standalone UCaaS or an integrated UCaaS / CCaaS solution, or with the upcoming BRIDGE solution – which provides UC capabilities on legacy systems, enabling users to further extend their investments. 

What really sets UNIVERGE BLUE apart in an increasingly crowded market – and one benefit it has over competitors – is its telephony capability with over 100 enterprise-level PBX features.  

“There’s a multitude of desktop collaboration applications available in the market today, but they fall down in not having that underlying core telephony capability,” explained Cooper.  

“UNIVERGE BLUE comes from one vendor; we’re not bolting lots of different third party developments together – which inherently have their own challenges. This is one platform that’s designed from the ground upwards. Resellers also get one admin simple portal and one open API integration platform” 

Established over 120 years ago, NEC has established a reputation for designing and building technology that is easy to use and understand. UNIVERGE BLUE is an extension of the vendor’s ‘Crazy Simple’ ethos.  

Cooper stated that it is important for the industry to recognise that though digital transformation has accelerated in recent years and many companies have started migrating to the cloud because of the mass shift to hybrid working, there are still many businesses out there dependent on legacy systems.  

“If you read certain articles around the way that the world’s going, you will be led to believe that the entire world is moving to cloud,” he said. 

“In some cases, you’ll be led to believe that the world has already moved to the cloud. But the reality is that there still a huge number of premise-based systems installed. From our point of view, we aim to offer our partners and end users the choice of cloud, hybrid and on-premises – and we have all bases covered” 

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3C6t66R