technologyreseller.co.uk 25 UNIFIED COMMS With its flexibility and simplicity, NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE UCaaS and CCaaS platform is a compelling proposition for IT and print resellers looking to get into UC. James Goulding finds out more from Andrew Cooper, NEC Sales Director for the UK and Ireland existing on-premises PBX or an existing collaboration solution like Microsoft Teams, enabling customers to make a complete or phased transition to UCaaS or CCaaS. Andrew Cooper, NEC Sales Director, UK and Ireland, points out that the ability to offer on-premises, cloud and hybrid solutions enables resellers to address a much wider customer base. “The whole world hasn’t moved to cloud overnight. There are still lots of legacy PBXs out there and we still sell an awful lot of premises-based technology because cloud isn’t for everybody. We continue to be a global leader in premise-based technology – in SMB, we have been Number 1 for six consecutive years and in the enterprise world we have always been in the Top 3. However, our goal is to offer choice, which UNIVERGE BLUE enables us to do. “We are very focused on offering a hybrid approach, where we are able to lay our cloud technologies over a customer’s existing premises-based PBX (from NEC or a third party). This could be someone who bought a PBX a year ago and likes the idea of adding some of the functionality provided by UNIVERGE BLUE, such as collaboration, mobility, chat, contact centre, while sweating their existing assets. Or it could be a customer that wants to run their legacy premises-based solution in their headquarters and implement a cloud solution for satellite offices. We can do that as well. With UNIVERGE BLUE, we offer choice to our partners and, more importantly, enable them to offer choice to their customers.” In the case of Teams, UNIVERGE BLUE can compete directly with the collaboration solution or it can be used to enhance Microsoft’s offering. For example, a customer could use the Teams app for productivity and collaboration and UNIVERGE BLUE Connect for voice communications and contact centre, or they could use Teams for everything – productivity, collaboration, making calls, receiving calls – but carry all voice traffic across the UNIVERGE BLUE infrastructure, with its enterprise telephony functionality and Five 9s reliability. Easy option for print and IT resellers Cooper argues that UNIVERGE BLUE is highly compelling for print and IT resellers looking to diversify their offering with unified communications. This is partly due to its ease of use – “The system is extremely quick and easy to on-board. If you start at 9 a.m., you can learn our solution, become accredited in it and provision a customer by mid-afternoon,” claims Cooper – and partly because it provides a clear migration path to the cloud. “With UNIVERGE BLUE, resellers don’t have to have that hard conversation with customers and say ‘throw away your PBX’. Instead, they can overlay our technology on existing solutions and either show them the advantages of using some of that additional functionality immediately or enable a migration path so that in two years’ time, if the customer decides they are ready to move from on-premises to the cloud, they can do so using the same tooling. It offers a very, very straightforward migration strategy.” Analysis from MZA highlights the opportunities this presents, with the installed base of on-premises and cloud solutions forecast to move from a 58:42 split this year to a 40:60 split in 2025 (source: MZA, The UK Hosted/Cloud Business Telephony Market: Installed Base by Technology – Cloud vs Premises-based). Working together Cooper adds that there are other benefits in partnering with NEC, rather than another UCaaS provider. “A lot of cloud solutions out there By the end of this year, NEC will have fulfilled its ambition to deliver a complete Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution by fully integrating the UNIVERGE BLUE Engage contact centre application and UNIVERGE BLUE UC and IT applications on the same portal, with easy management of all elements via a single pane of glass. NEC was late to enter the UCaaS market – it only introduced its UNIVERGE BLUE cloud services platform in the summer – but with this latest development it is now looking to position itself at the forefront of this growing market with a sophisticated, flexible offering that enables partners to meet the diverse needs of customers of all sizes, from SMEs to enterprises, at every stage of their cloud journey. The UNIVERGE BLUE platform gives access to four distinct but integrated suites that collectively deliver all a business needs to communicate, collaborate and store/share/manage/backup/restore documents, for one predictable monthly subscription. These are: n Connect – for unified communications, including cloud phone system (and call minutes), presence, team chat, audioconferencing, video-conferencing, file-sharing; n Meet – for online meetings, including HD video conferencing, screen sharing, one-click recording, transcription and webinars; n Share – for file share, sync & backup, including cloud storage, access to files from any device, document sharing, backup and file restore to any point in time; n Engage – for advanced contact centre, including omni-channel customer experience (phone, email, web, social media, chat, mobile), skills-based routing, auto-attendants, call-backs, status monitoring, reports. Flexible deployment UNIVERGE BLUE can be deployed as an organisation’s sole unified communications/collaboration platform or it can be used in conjunction with an A platform for all-comers Continued...
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