Unified communication (UC) is increasingly important to enterprises as employees bring a widening array of mobile devices into the workplace. “Businesses have been implementing more mobility into their UC architectures over the past year and now are looking toward videoconferencing to help drive further productivity,” said analyst Diane Myers of Infonetics, summarizing the results of her firm’s recent survey on the topic.
This week BroadSoft said that Sprint has chosen its BroadWorks platform to enhance voice-over-IP services for both enterprises and consumers. “We were seeking a single voice and video application server platform to support our IMS network transformation in order to provide the communication services both our consumer and enterprise customers are demanding today,” said Iyad Tarazi, Sprint’s vice president of network development, .
The BroadSoft application server integrates with 2G, 3G, and 4G IMS-based networks. The company says this enables operators to offer VoIP services over legacy GSM and CDMA networks, and to transition these services to LTE when the carrier migrates to voice-over-LTE (VoLTE). Sprint is a CDMA carrier, and has not yet announced a timeline for a move to VoLTE.
Separately, Sprint announced this week that its cloud-based UC solution, Sprint Complete Collaboration, will now integrate Microsoft Lync. Sprint’s UC solution is deployed over IP networks and is meant to enable collaboration between multiple mobile devices and operating systems. Microsoft Lync is a video conferencing and instant messaging client.
Genband separates phone numbers from devices
This week Genband launched a UC solutions framework called Generation Enterprise, supported by a new platform that moves phone numbers into the cloud. “Generation Enterprise is our framework of enterprise solutions that span all of what enterprises need to do to be able to have unified communications and messaging,” said Genband CMO Bradley Bush.
Bush thinks enterprises will value the new solution because it is device agnostic. “Genband doesn’t have an interest in any kind of phone hardware,” he said. “We’re purely becoming a software company. We have changed all of our products into software now and we don’t have any hardware phones that we have to be beholden to like some of the enterprise companies. So what we can do is come in whether you want to keep your endpoints, use new endpoints, use your existing IP, put it in the cloud, put it in premise, [or] put it in combination of either one. We can kind of do any of that and I think that’s one of the main advantages of our new enterprise framework.”
Generation Enterprise delivers secure voice and HD video to tablets, PCs, smartphones and desk phones. It is compatible with TDM and IP, and can be deployed on wired or wireless networks whether they are public or private. Generation Enterprise is supported by Genband’s new Smart Office 2.0 platform, which the company calls “the industry’s first WebRTC-enabled UC platform.” Smart Office 2.0 separates the user’s phone number from the device by moving it to the cloud. A user can engage in calls, videoconferences or screen shares from any connected device, and can use their work phone number to access these communications.
