VoiceCon: Aastra Intecom Goes VoIP

Thursday, 27 March 2008 02:00 Written by Peter Brockmann

Aastra made news earlier this quarter with the acquisition of Ericsson's enterprise business. While at the show, I stopped at the Aastra Intecom booth and connected with Robyn Thompson, Marketing Manager and Dana Call, EVP and GM of the Aastra Intecom division.

We talked about the 2005 acquisition of Intecom by Aastra and how that transaction worked out for Intecom employees and customers. Aastra's philosophy of integration is to integrate the common functions of legal, finance, supply chain and HR. The product and customer-specific aspects remain under the purview of the general manager. So, Dana has been able to support the Intecom customer base of large campus organizations such as state universities, the United Nations (in New York City) and Microsoft.

This centralized/decentralized approach is a solid method for managing the integration and continued profitability of mature businesses.

At VoiceCon, Aastra Intecom was making much of their new Clearspan™ offering and its positioning with the PointSpan offering. Pointspan is a SIP PBX function that interoperates directly with the Intecom installed base, as a hybrid TDM-VoIP implementation.

Clearspan is a Aastra Intecom-branded OEM of the BroadSoft BroadWorks IMS-compliant softswitch. Aastra Intecom is enabling new campus implementations for enterprises that want and have the scale to benefit from the carrier-grade IP telephony and application infrastructure of an IMS fabric.

The Clearspan offering delivers complete production-reinforced features for enterprise telephony, IMS-compliant mobility, hosted and multi-tenant facilities, unified communications and third party applications integrations. The design, integration, implementation and support services provided by Aastra Intecom enable a complete enterprise-centric solution that large enterprises need.