HP expands unified comms and collaboration portfolio

New services promise to lower costs and increase performance.

HP has announced a raft of new offerings in its unified communications (UC) and collaboration portfolio, which it claims will help businesses increase productivity and lower costs by consolidating infrastructure, devices and management tools.

The update ensures that HP's products are compatible with the latest version of Microsoft's Communications Server 14 platform.

HP explained that, as enterprise communications systems grow ever larger, it is important that they do not operate in isolation and are integrated into UC platforms in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Meg Shea-Chiles, vice president of Microsoft strategic alliances at HP, stressed the importance of businesses reducing complexity in communication systems to better manage growing numbers of mobile workers.

"With these new offerings, we are enhancing how people interact, shorten business decision cycle times and connect remote employees to company culture," she said.

HP also announced a new Survivable Branch Communication zl Module that it claimed can reduce infrastructure requirements at remote branch offices and increase business productivity and reliability.

Additionally, HP said that combining Microsoft's Communications Server 14 and HP ProCurve software within HP's ProCurve Switch 8200zl and 5400zl products could help provide reliable communications by ensuring that any wide area network failures do not affect businesses.

The firm also said that customers could improve the efficiency and scalability of their communications systems by migrating from existing legacy PBX and key systems to centralised remote management products run on the Communications Server 14 system.