NEC tempts channel with new UC products

Technology vendor NEC is making its unified communications (UC) products available to the Australian SMB and enterprise markets.

Steve Woff, UC business manager at NEC Australia, told CRN that the products will be available through its Australian channel partners. He claimed there was a large revenue stream for services and consultancy around NEC’s UC offering.

“The ability to integrate hardware and software from different vendors based on the business need is the core of NEC’s strength in UC and the opportunity for resellers to build on consultancy and service revenues around these offerings is substantial,” he said.

Woff said NEC has rolled out education and training to all of its 138 channel partners across Australia which represents a mix of traditional telecoms and IT integrators.

Analyst firm Frost and Sullivan claim the UC market is worth $485 million and is set to increase by 10.3 percent over the next six years.

According to Woff, NEC's SV8100 communications server will be suited for the SMB market, while the SV8000 desktop suite and a new range of scalable and customisable desktop IP phones will also be available to that market segment.

“The small and medium-sized business markets have been aggressively targeted by many communications vendors, but typically the products lack the level of call quality companies should expect,” he claimed.

For the enterprise market, NEC launched its UNIVERGE360 platform - a set of servers, desktop applications, middleware and services designed to take UC beyond simple communications integration to provide embedded roles-based functionality to increase employee productivity.

“Unified communications is about much more than converging the phone, email and instant messaging; it’s about bringing people, processes and communications together,” he said.