NEC Joins Growing Band of UC Vendors
NEC's wide-ranging UC launch emphasizes a move to hardware and open standards. NEC Unified Solutions jumped on the unified communications bandwagon on March 12 with the introduction of a wide-ranging product update focused on the roles users have within their businesses. The new products, which NEC introduced in advance of VoiceCon March 17 to 20 in Orlando, Fla., are built around NEC's Univerge360 strategy, which integrates users' organization roles with automated business processes. Univerge360 was launched in February.
"We look at how their communications needs dictate the type of technology they use," said Paul Lopez, general manager for marketing at NEC Unified Solutions. "With Univerge360 we integrated communications throughout your business and leveraged an open-standards approach to let you maximize your options." The new products represent a bit of a departure for NEC and a shoring up of its competitive stance in the market against big players such as Cisco Systems and Avaya, said Brian Riggs, research director at Current Analysis.
"NEC is completely rethinking its product line and what it needs to deliver to enterprise customers today. This is really making a very clear move toward offering a set of communications products that are very software applications-oriented and very server-based. NEC is now trying to deliver a set of software much more in line with what competitors offer," Riggs said. To read more about NEC's unified communications products, click here... more >>>